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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Heh. This is my friends blog.

Anyway, I’ll repeat here what I told him on IRC: you’ll have a hard time if you’re waiting for a memory safe web renderer. Servo is far from there.

I use qutebrowser (which uses QtWebEngine underneath, which uses Chromium even more underneath) and I love it to death (even though it consumes 24GiB of ram right now).

I even had a mini project to make qute backend onto Servo which _mostly_ was working until I gave up because even basic websites didn’t render correctly with Servo.

But otherwise I think Qute ticks all his boxes, because you can disable so much of what the engine is doing- but even though it’s python it depends, hard, on C++ components, like Qt and Chromiums renderer and… you can’t turn off subsets of the JavaScript language.

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You might consider advising your friend to shy away from the "rant" and "hot take" styles, I know it's popular among bloggers and twitter users but it's pretty uninteresting reading for someone who's read this type of post about web browsers for what feels like the 1000th time... If it was feasible from a technical and business standpoint for the chromium team to cut costs and remove 95% of the features added in the last 5-10 years, they would have done it by now!

I will not be advising him of that because I share his opinion that the web is fast becoming/has become an application delivery system and not a document reading system with some media additions; in fact many here reading this will say "duh!" because they assume this is a good thing.

I don't think it's a good thing, I think it's inefficient and used against people as much as it's used _for_ people. Standards such as "WebUSB" are just incredulous.

The fact that some very smart people managed to get a javascript renderer to go real fast seems to have spawned millions of people just to dump garbage into it constantly, and -require it to be enabled- to do things that used to be possible without it.. it's shockingly bad for accessibility, bad for performance, bad for my ram. But I guess you don't have to worry about _my_ ram.

I'm very sure it's profitable to turn the web into an application platform, and it _is_ delivering a lot of actual value to a lot of people, certain things would never be possible, but it's abused too, and honestly it takes a lot away, privacy among them... but we can't talk about that as an industry because half of the people in it depend on that ecosystem being maintained.

I'm not going to go as far as to say that "the web" is the new oil industry; because we have no oil spill equivalent and we havent gone to war about it (though the e-waste due to inefficiencies and "everyone has 8G of ram, right!?" is likely not helping the ecological situation).

But the industry is propped up because it's too big to fail now, and you're damned if you get in the way.

> I will not be advising him of that because I share his opinion that the web is fast becoming an application delivery system and not a document reading system with some media additions; in fact many here reading this will say "duh!" because they assume this is a good thing.

I guess I'm one of those "duh" people. I think it already is an application platform/delivery system (has been for a long time), and I think that the ever-evolving web is a good thing.

In college, I had professors literally laugh at me when I said I believed most software was moving toward the internet. Fast-forward to today and I'd say that their actual insults against my chosen direction of software engineering (targeting standards-based web solutions) were not only unprofessional - they were entirely not correct.

Reading this document literally felt like I was hearing their arguments as to "what the internet should be" all over again... And, as someone who embraces the internet, I feel so much of this is regressive. Especially in regards to taking shots at stuff like WebRTC...

Your friend and I differ so much in-that they argue against things like communication, graphics, gaming, etc in the browser where-as I have built a career off of embracing it.

> I'm very sure it's profitable to turn the web into an application platform

The web has been an application platform since ECMA landed in Netscape, and arguably long before that too. The anti-application "content presentation only" take has been something for a long time, and it is not going to happen or we'd still be on the original "Hyper Text Markup Language" spec. The web has always wanted to be more than it's previous spec... it's an ever-evolving standard that is designed to meet the changing needs of it's users in an ever-changing world.

Information, capability, and expression all want to be free.

If by free you mean mandatory accounts, activity trackers, 50% screen ads, background crypto miners, 8gb ram for reading the news and email, abysmal performance for what is essentially displaying text, media and information, literally WASM VMs and background webagents running in browser.

No thanks, I'd like native back.

I worked with a startup that is putting IDE into the web, and I kinda did like web at first. Then I worked at a startup that wanted to run jobs in client browser using WASM instead of cloud compute resources.

At first, I really liked being able to run interpreted code, to change code at runtime without having to recompile, to be able to visit a website and then borrow code for theme/animations I liked. But that is long past now in the vDOM age for performance in what is a very inefficient system.

> If by free you mean mandatory accounts, activity trackers, 50% screen ads, background crypto miners, 8gb ram for reading the news and email, abysmal performance for what is essentially displaying text, media and information, literally WASM VMs and background webagents running in browser.

When I said "information/capability/expression want to be free" it was not inclusive of all of these negative things. And, I find it a direct bad-faith argument to say "well that's what you get when X", given "X" is my statement "information/capability/expression want to be free".

I find your "I'd like native back" statement to be akin to "people abuse stuff so we should just outlaw what they abuse"... Features in tech are going to be pushed toward capitalistic ends because we live in a capitalistic world. Truly - I am the money I make... I am as important as my bank account dictates. My access to healthcare, education, resources, everything dictates this. I live in America - if I am not profitable I literally do not deserve to exist within civil society, and this problem is not exclusive to the US.

"Mandatory accounts, activity trackers, 50% screen ads, background crypto miners, 8gb ram for reading the news and email" - these are more a product of the content of the above paragraph than my claim "information/capability/expression want to be free". My entire life has been about the world trying to milk every dollar it can from some sucker - in every freakin' aspect. I am what I spend.

Until we fix what I am outlining in the above paragraphs, I think every bit of tech is going to be pushed toward hyper-capitalistic purposes because it is literally our culture to worship money above all else. Even services/solutions that should service social means are bastardized for privatized profits - including browsers.

I probably shouldn't be making these arguments here on HN as I find most of us here are so stubborn that we would willingly neuter parts of our computing experience to realizing personal ideals which alienate us from the general population of computer users. Even re-reading this comment makes me feel like some self-aggrandizing prick which I find most of us here are.

> When I said "information/capability/expression want to be free" it was not inclusive of all of these negative things. And, I find it a direct bad-faith argument to say "well that's what you get when X", given "X" is my statement "information/capability/expression want to be free".

There's a lot of bad things about native too, but it is not trying to replace an existing working system while failing the end-users so bad. Neither is my argument to outlaw items that are abused.

> I am the money I make... I am as important as my bank account dictates.

No thanks.

I'm not saying one solution is bad over the other (ie: feature-rich browsers vs. "native" ones).

I'm saying you made a bad-faith argument misrepresenting what I was saying when I said "information/capability/expression want to be free" by conflating that phrase/statement with literal anti-user dark patterns that I find are more rooted in capitalistic practices...

I'm presenting the argument that information does want to be free but web as a whole is quite less free than its proponents would like us to believe. And I'm definitely saying web is bad over native for the consumer, maybe not for the developer who can worry less about knowing native development which is arguably not just more complex but has quite a lot more of legacy baggage as well.

Web is quite largely controlled and censored by a handful of corporations - Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter.

Even the standards are largely dictated by Google (who ring! ring! also owns the web platform in name of Chrome).

Sure - you're stating common known facts.

Let me repeat... when you conflate my whole "information, capability, and expression all want to be free" with a ton of negative/gray-pattern stuff you're invalidating my original point in the above comments with what I see as a separate concern, ie: everything has to be built to milk money from people.

Exploitative capitalism/money making dark patterns !== "information, capability, and expression all want to be free"

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I'm done.

Basically Google woke up and decided it wanted to be Microsoft without actually dealing with hardware vendors so let’s just put everything on web and hey, let’s track and show you ads while we do it at .98 efficiency

I'm not sure I understand what your opinion actually is? What you've stated is a fact, not an opinion: that's what the web platform is now. So it really makes no sense to rant about that, in context. You say you won't be advising him of that, but you also seem to be arguing in favor of advising him of that, not against, and are in fact already somewhat doing it already, so it's not clear what you meant there. It may benefit to be more consistent here, and make the advice to him anyway.

What would make more sense, and be more valuable, would be to talk about what value was actually taken away, and what steps could be done to provide that value again, without taking other bits of value away in the process. The blog post, as it's written, only argues for taking more value away. So I didn't find it convincing towards that end, and it seems you didn't either, as per your GP comment. So I'm pretty confused by this follow up response.

When you spend more time arguing about how the message was said rather than what the message is actually trying to convey, it doesn’t matter what the response is: it’s unlikely that you were ever going to listen to the message anyway.

This isn’t directly specifically at you, just this whole thread in general.

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