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