The web is chock full of shit JavaScript; most of which is not adding value for me (ad placement, etc) and some of which is at odds with my interests (trackers, etc).
We have every single web site wanting to give me some sort of unique experience when all I want is to navigate to the information I want and maybe buy something.
I think that the web is insane. I want the web to deliver content and I want my client to present it to me in a way I control. Instead, every server wants to control my browser so they can control my experience and extract data from me.
It messed up.
Yet these days, to do that somehow requires a disturbingly slow-loading and resource-consuming JS "webapp" that complains if you're not using one of the very few "supported" browsers or even just a slightly older version thereof, refuses to work with a "sorry, an error occurred" message frequently, and has a UI that looks like it was made for illiterate 5-year-olds? The average web forum works fine with absolutely NO JS, yet has a UI with a superior set of functionality and richness.
Surprisingly, Twitter and YouTube used to be far more user-friendly and less resource-consuming than they are today. Then... I'm not sure what happened. I guess it could be called "the modern web".
Facebook too... the latest redesign is an abomination, and as much as I like having a dark mode, the new UI is so slow and so laggy that it makes me not want to use Facebook anymore. But I've been using Facebook since 2005 when it was just a LAMP system that served server-rendered HTML, and it was amazing. I remember my peers talking about how Facebook was so much better than MySpace because it was so clean and snappy.
> The web sucks [...]
The web as an app-delivery platform is amazing. I don't miss documents that only open in WordPerfect 5.1, or having to UUCP files around, or being forced to write non-platform-specific software once for Windows, once for Mac, maybe once for Unix, and hell with anything else.
To the point of TFA, the desktop as a concept is well past its expiration date. Apple ships amazing phones and tablets that are touch-based, and is migrating their touch-based UX to MacOS, but for some damn reason refuses to ship touchscreens, which is just bonkers. We're halfway between paradigms right now, so it's rough going sometimes, but I'm hopeful we'll get somewhere great.
Touch based computing doesn't scale to larger devices very well.
It works well on phones since our fingers are just doing small movements, but on larger devices, users get "gorilla arms" when using large touch screen devices while having to hold their arms in the air.
However, I had a touchscreen XPS 13 a while back. And being able to tap the occasional button or slider was _super_ helpful. Certainly more helpful and less jarring than the touch bar my Macbook has.
And consider things like the Microsoft Surface Studio, a desktop PC with a touch display designed to angle at a position that would be more usable with a pen or touch controls for longer periods of time.
We're getting there.
The web apps that I enjoy using are the ones that enable real-time collaboration. I think that's where the web app wins out over native. But the vast majority of things we do online are nothing to do with that.
I reckon I skip 80% of the links I engage with here because I'm immediately presented with a GDPR dialogue, or because the website won't load because it relies on some external domain that I've blocked.
As for iOS and macOS, I really don't think they're serious productivity platforms. I've migrated everything that matters to me to Linux, and when my iPhone finally dies, I'll move over to a Linux phone as well.
Your OS sucks, because it doesn't make it safe for you to do so. The freedom to just run something without worry about side-effects is what we used to have back in the days of two floppy disk MS-DOS machines, and it was amazing. Your OS was safe because of the backups, and the write protect tab. Your data disk was all you risked, and you had copies of that as well. Your side effects were well known and contained.
We need to reclaim our general purpose computers. Capability Based Operating systems are how we do it.
What about an attacker reading secrets off your system? How does the OS protect that especially with Spectre around.
If you don't give your task access to the clock, it can't run a timing attack.
If you don't give your task access to the internet, it can't exfiltrate any data it did get.
I moved house last year and was on a very poor internet connection, 0.5Mbps up, 1Mbps down at best, often unreliable.
This made using my computer (Mac's) unbearable!
When I turned on the computer and it started up, apps that auto start in the task bar would phone home checking for updates or whatever and block until they timed out / got a response. The computer wasn't usable until all completed due to blocked UI.
Opening an application the same. When opening an app it'd phone home to do what ever it does while blocking everything else until complete so can continue with the startup process. The obsession with analytics in apps made latency in apps much higher as I suspect analytics where being sent from the main thread instead of best effort in a background thread pulling from an event queue.
Then there's the obsession of packaging a SPA webapp in it's own browser to run locally as a perceived native app, aka Electron. Take Teams/Slack both clunky, unresponsive user interfaces and resource hogs for what they are.
And of course you can make linux do almost anything you want it do.
In fact, sometimes it’s worth it to hit airplane mode if your connection is bad until after everything is running.
For reference, my audiobooks are stored locally, a network connection is not required to continue playing. Yet somehow they have hindered the main functionality of the app by what I can only assume is sloppy coding.
It is up to us to build something better, and the Web offers a better framework than most other options:
Human-readable code, mostly text
Decentralized and independent
Great tooling for just about any platform
25+ years of public knowledge
I think we're only beginning to see a new epoch of Web tools which:
Can be run locally and remotely
Support just about any browser, certainly no-JS and Lynx
Work hard to help the user without demanding anything
Allow easy migration of content between instances and instances between hosts
Full honesty and transparency of internal works
I might be a bit biased, since I have been writing such a thing, but almost every day I see another project here on HN which has similar values and functionality.
c.f. endless attempts/experiences rediscovering basic principles behind UI toolkits now taking place in web-dev land. Not identical to 1990-2005, but rhymes like crazy.
A couple of years ago, I realized that the art of web development is about to be lost, and I started to re-learn all those lost skills, such as direct DOM manipulation, feature-checking, backwards compatibility testing, etc.
I now have a reasonably functional website which works back to the earliest HTTP/1.1 browsers, like IE3 and NN2, classics like Windows Safari and Opera 12, and many many other lovable, once again usable browsers.
One idea is to improve the design of the web browser (including the engine), since the current design makes many things difficult for the end user to customize.
No-JS is almost always suitable, although not quite always. When scripts are needed, you should include a <noscript> block, including the documentation, raw data, other protocols, etc as appropriate. (There are some web pages that do this, but it seems to be rare.)
What thing had you been writing?
If I'm running a hotel, for example, my valet has to know how to accomodate old cars and new cars, manual and automatic, electric and combustion, and possibly motorcycles and scooters and such...
If someone comes to the front desk, I have to be polite to them no matter what, whether they look dirty or clean, normal or weird, I can't tell them, your appearance is not good enough, or you don't speak the right language to be at my hotel.
I think the idea of telling the user their browser isn't good enough is the same level of rudeness, it's an act of laziness and arrogance to not even try...
And yes, there are so many different browsers and levels of convenience, and if you want the GUEST to have a good experience, you have to accomodate the shortcomings of their own vehicle, which they may have no choice over, or may even enjoy using and have an attachment to...
The thing I've been working on is mentioned in my profile, the live site is only a few days behind my local dev. Here's a short video I just made with you in mind:) 5igA8Zz56NU
(If you have a computer with internet, and if it will serve a plain ASCII text connection even not needing HTML or Telnet commands, nor VT-100 or anything like that, nor non-ASCII characters, then it can work if you have internet, if you have a computer with a keyboard (using a telnet client, or just nc, or whatever); that is the minimal possibility. So, it is another possibility maybe; of course is not only possibility.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
In my opinion it has many shortcomings compared to "Web 1.1"
There are few choices in clients...
A lot of older hardware is left behind...
The TLS requirement means no human-readable protocol...
But the biggest one, in my opinion as an experienced IT person, is that it is a "clean start", meaning all the same problems which have already been solved in HTTP and NNTP worlds will present themselves again, one at a time, and require solution.
It is true, although it is not too difficult to write. (A new web browser could include Gemini (in addition to Gopher, HTTP(S), and possibly others).) However, even if you do not have other client software, the "openssl s_client" can be used, too (although having the specialized software works better, it doesn't mean that such specialized software is required). (It also ought to be added into curl I think, but they didn't do that.)
> The TLS requirement means no human-readable protocol...
I agree that this can be a problem. My suggestion is to add a non-TLS version using "insecure-gemini:" as the URI scheme name.
> ...all the same problems which have already been solved in HTTP and NNTP worlds will present themselves again...
Gemini can be a substitute for HTTP and Gopher (in some cases); it is not a substitute for NNTP, I think.
if you are on mobile it doesn't matter. mobile native is in at least half the cases just as post-file cloud-ified as the web. this change is coming for native apps too. no one escapes.
blaming the web for this is shallow & sad to me. everyone is clamoring for adoption, for ease of use, for just works, and putting all the data in the cloud (and de-prioritizing user access) has been a hugely hugely successful trend (alas).
I have no idea what web you are on but perhaps you should be using better sites that aren't waded through like treacle. person Nally this article loaded in under 3s on my 4 year old phone with no ad blockers (shame on me). load times vary a lot & it's easy to complain about but there are plenty of bad apps, not efficiently coded, that could better make use of features too. few apps are lively enough, have access to anywhere like the vast troves of data most sites interiorly contain, so it's also an absurd comparison.
if you are on mobile it doesn't matter.
I'm also not blaming the web as a technology. I'm saying that websites are becoming unusable.
I have no idea what web you are on but perhaps you should be using better sites that aren't waded through like treacle.
person Nally this article loaded in under 3s
https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui... 16 requests, 257.63 KB / 67.48 KB transferred, Finish: 30.97 s, DOMContentLoaded: 2.53 s, load: 4.87 s.
https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html 1 request, 1 MB / 206.34 KB transferred, Finish: 1.74 s, load: 2.69 s.
It does and I understand you're speaking in the context of desktop. But what about mobile apps?
I cannot imagine computing without web equivalent for mobile apps which often collect unnecessary data and on-average users are powerless to do anything about it.
Worst are the mobile only applications, Hence applications like Clubhouse can get away with using mobile number as identifier. Not that I miss using Clubhouse on web, But just an example of what no-web computing looks like.
We should still have web apps where they add value - I’m writing one at the moment - but I’ve reduced my reliance on Google Suite in particular and I’m more productive as a result.
Some specific examples: When looking up resources on high school level mathematics, it appears that fully half of the content is paywalled. Often this paywalled content isn’t particularly valuable in the first place (eg, hiding a basic multiplication chart behind a paywall)
And a more technical example: when I was learning the Angular framework, damn near all the results on Google were SEO scams. It was content masquerading as tutorials, but when you reach the end (often after investing significant time), they try to extract money from you to read the rest of the guide.
It’s gotten to the point where I’d be willing to pay money to filter out all the garbage from the web.
For stuff like basic math, which literally hasn't changed for a century, I find the old books at archive.org to be very useful.
As for your attempts to learn Angular, maybe Google was doing you a favour ;)
For the maths, look up Eddie Woo on YouTube
There's a few images, too, the first of which is ~2MB.