Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

They'll be complete when users have absolutely no way to interact with a web page other than what was explicitly intended by the company serving the web page, and when every possible interaction between the user and their computer is reported back to the the web page they're accessing.

There will be three browsers: The "Safe Browser" which will be used by 85% of people, the "Smart Browser" which will be used by 5% of people, and the "Rebel Browser" which will be used by 10% of people, most of them in their teens and 20s. They will each have different skins (and t-shirts), but all be identical under the hood. The Rebel Browser will allow you to consent to accessing porn, and when the Smart Browser reports that it is the Smart Browser to sites its users visit, they will only be served articles, ads and search results that make them feel smarter than everyone else. The Safe Browser will have an "Important Business" mode that will allow you to consent to accessing porn, but it will examine your face first to ostensibly determine if you're a serious adult. The Rebel browser will also silently examine your face, and for the same reason - to track your porn preferences.

The day it will be feature-complete is when sites get an API for bricking your computer, which is routed through an algorithmic federal judge.

...and there will be a 4th one used by almost 0% of people, which is illegal to use along with the general-purpose computer that's required to use it, but provides the user complete control:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

IMHO the web started to go down this path in the late 2000s. Recent developments (manifestv3, DoH, youtube-dl, etc.) are only further indications of the continuing trend towards increasing corporate control and dumbing-down of the users (so they become less likely to oppose.)

This is presented in a sort of hyperbolic way. But I do really think this is the future- and not as far off as people think. But not for nefarious reasons. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Average users value performance, cost, and battery life. The cost efficiency and capabilities of cloud compute will always outpace that of consumer mobile devices. So remote compute with zero user control is inevitable.

A stadia like experience for everything is what the overwhelming majority of consumers want- they just don't know it yet.

Yet somehow every site became a single-page app rendered client-side. I'm absolutely certain that browsing consumes at least twice the power it did 10 years ago (and 5x the RAM.)

I visit a lot of the same pages I did 10 years ago, but now they take as long as they would have taken 20 years ago to render.

> Average users value performance, cost, and battery life. The cost efficiency and capabilities of cloud compute will always outpace that of consumer mobile devices. So remote compute with zero user control is inevitable.

I don't think this is a question of what users value, it's a question of what large software companies value. Non-technical users absolutely value their privacy and freedom even if they don't put it in explicitly ideological terms: they want to pirate copyrighted material, they are annoyed by paywalls and ads, they are creeped out by how much social networks knows about them.

I'm more or less resigned to this being a continuous struggle with ongoing turnover of tech. The '00s solution for preventing people from interacting with your web page in unapproved ways was to do it all in Flash; that eventually died.

Stunning. Your nickname is really fitting :)

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