Alan Kay answers: Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers? | Hacker News Reader

Alan Kay answers: Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?

quora.com

37 pointstpmx12 comments

I'm strongly sympathetic to the Alan Kay vision of browsers-as-operating systems (see an earlier comment on a similar topic [0]) and yet I still miss the days where I could read what someone had to say without loading yet another JS webapp. The dumb document viewer model for the web was probably doomed from the start. There are just too many unique ways to consume media, so instead, we as an industry repurposed the document layer (http) as a portable distribution platform for all the new web browsers that could just be dumb document viewers accessible to a mass audience of creators (facebook, twitter, youtube, etc...).

I think the Electron/ChromeOS/FirefoxOS/WebOS/Early iOS model is us finally recognizing that we've made some levels redundant and are now collapsing the stack (browser/native OS). It's slow, it's ugly, but we're getting there.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855029

Let's imagine that sometime around 2007 or so, we had decided to make make web apps (full-blown-apps) separate from web pages (structured documents, perhaps with some light level of dynamic aspects).

I think Google were smarter than all of us. They hired all these (often very young, smart but inexperienced) standards people they could find, and set them to work on making the browser the new OS.

Merging the browser and OS has been attempted so often, I'd hesitate to say that Google was smarter than all of us. It's probably more that they had the most leverage and motive to be to be successful.

To me, the interesting development was that we as an industry rushed to native (ObjC) on iOS so quickly once it was available only to later return to web technologies with Electron and friends, but there were reasonable technical arguments for that at the time so it's hard for me to say that anyone was an idiot. Web technologies in the 00s were... not good.

The bigger picture is: Google hired lots of these web standards people.. who then just went nuts in creating so many web standards/apis/complexity. In retrospect I would guess they were probably meeting KPIs.

So, to the plan to dominate the web was there already around 2007-2008 or or so, all while hiring lot and lots of very talented C++ developers (probably like 3k of them working on chrome by now, I haven't kept up the past five years).

Together they built the monopoly/duopoly that is called Chrome. It's built on open standards, but enforced by an ever growing complexity.

For sure. My objection is that I think that move was more obvious for Google than it was for, say, Microsoft or Apple, who still had a native-mindset and wanted to lock people into their existing platforms. Arguably, Google's move was a response to the threat of native lock in. Once they started, it was easier to execute on than smaller web-centric companies because they had the unique privilege of advertizing the Google Browser on... Google.

That web technologies actually became wildly popular for native-style apps probably owes more to the diversification of platforms and difficulty of writing native apps for all of them, otherwise it would have become yet another platform that no one writes apps for. I don't know if Google could or did predict that.

The biggest, strongest, insurmountablest advantage Google had over MS, Apple, Sun, Nokia, Oracle, Adobe and everybody else is that they didn't need to sell anything, hardware or software. They just needed a platform for selling ads. Any platform would do, so long as it would catch on and no ad competitor controlled it.

Let's imagine that ... we had decided to make make web apps (full-blown-apps) separate from web pages

Java? Flash? NaCl? Somehow JS+HTML+CSS beat them all.

I'm (or, well, was) thinking more like HTML+CSS for web pages and JS+HTML+CSS for web apps.

"The underlying system for a browser should not be that of an “app” but of an Operating System whose job would be to protectively and safely run encapsulated systems (i.e. “real objects”) gotten from the web. It should be the way that web content could be open-ended, and not tied to functional subsets in the browser."

This feels like the truest web, what I want to see. I'm not sure how much the browser needs to do the work, and how much it is the role of pages themselves to encapsulate & orchestrate multiple dispirate web entities- not just for their own service, but amid other services too, using their entities as well.

anyhow, here's to hoping that in this decade we get a lot of good skills & experience making web components richer better entities on the web.

Such a clear and beautiful vision. Makes our 'modern' technologies seem very crude and fragmented.

> At the time of the WWW’s inception [...] made several recommendations [...]

> Apple’s Hypercard was a terrific and highly successful end-user authoring system whose media was scripted, WYSIWYG, and “symmetric” (in the sense that the “reader” could turn around and “author” in the same high-level terms and forms). It should be the start of — and the guide for — the “User Experience” of encountering and dealing with web content.

> The underlying system for a browser should not be that of an “app” but of an Operating System whose job would be to protectively and safely run encapsulated systems (i.e. “real objects”) gotten from the web. It should be the way that web content could be open-ended, and not tied to functional subsets in the browser.

[...]

> The second recommendation was to reinforce the idea that the content to be run within the system had to be as free from the tools of the OS as absolutely possible (because special needs often require special designs etc). An example, was that the content needed to be able to generate its own graphics if necessary (even if the OS supplied some graphics tools). The more the content wanted to go its own way, the more its presentation to the users had to be made to conform to the standards in (1). As with any decent OS, it has to allow for new ideas while also providing the resources for safety, efficiency, and to manifest user experiences.

Java stuck in an applet in a document made me sad in the 90s. It seemed to me Java should have been the canvas (or something more like the smalltalk that had inspired some of Java)

The problem of packaging portable User Experiences was partially dealt with by the JVM.

Now we’ve done it all again with JavaScript and Web Assembly (albeit lower level)

I’m not sure that where we ended up is all that bad but I can’t shake the feeling it could have been a lot better.

> One way to look at where things are today is that the circumstances of the Internet forced the web browsers to be more and more like operating systems, but without the design and the look-aheads that are needed.

It's hard to imagine developing in Smalltalk and then developing in ChromeOS. sigh

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