Why Google and Apple work to snuff out the mobile web
toot.cafe
toot.cafe
I don't know where this guy was when the iPhone came out, but this is backward. Steve Jobs reportedly did not want true third-party applications on the iPhone, and Apple pushed Web apps hard. They argued strenuously that Web apps were just fine.
Now... whether Jobs was convinced later, or the fact was that the tooling for native app development just wasn't ready... we all know where it ended up. But the author's revisionist history is bogus.
Developers were saying "why not NATIVE," whereas he claims the opposite.
Apple was saying "Web apps all the way!"
While I do resent a lot of Apple's lies and anti-user, anti-developer actions, I would give them a pass in this instance because they were inventing an industry-changing development ecosystem and they did so very, very well.
And not just Jobs and Apple on the HTML apps kick, Jon Rubenstein (aka 'the Podfather' for producing the iPod) left Apple to make Palm into a web app powerhouse, developing the webOS platform and the Palm Pre.
This is how mobile devices were supposed to work. The "native apps" jag is a disaster I'd argue was mostly generated by devs not users or manufacturers, and set mobile web back a decade.
The reason devs rejected Jobs' "write web apps" pitch, which was only ever about the SDK, store and APIs not being ready in time, was because it was so clearly not what Apple themselves were doing. Nor could they hope to match the quality of Apple's apps without using the same APIs.
This simple fact was true in 2007 and it still is true in 2022: you can't even animate a list item on the web without incurring significant performance costs. Slack eats 20% CPU on an M1 Mac to display a single animated emoji.
Web has never been, and never will be a platform for apps. This has nothing to do with "devs vs. users". Users want slick performant apps that don't destroy your battery life. Web cannot and will never be able to offer that.
Because the core of the web is, was and will for ever be a system to display static text and images in a single rendering pass.
They spent a huge amount of time rewriting everything from Java to .net and by the time they released the Kin phones they were no longer competitive in the market. Microsoft cancelled the Kin phones only a few weeks after their release.
you refer to "the author's revisionist history", sangnoir's comment in response says "the author also falsely claimed...", but these are referring to two different authors.
> the poster of that link seems to agree with the author of the core article
he literally wrote "While Chris is crisp about the problem and the consequences of not solving it, he doesn't have answers for why Google and Apple act the way they do" and proceeds to give a different history and background.
> but to be fair I didn't even remember that the HN post went to a tweet... or toot
so...you were confused.
AFAIK, this is completely false. There was never a webOS-type proposal. Where do people come up with this stuff?
Digging in, it seems like they worked on Chrome for several years before moving over to Edge. That would give them at least some technical insight into what happened at Google, if not the reasons behind those decisions.
Even so, it still feels like a lot more speculation than actual facts.
But that's me.
Alex Russel, a developer, team lead and developer advocate for Google for 13 years from 2008 to 2021. He's one of the primary people responsible for the web components mess.
He's quite well known in hte web/web-adjacent world. During his work at Google he would:
- go out of his way to blame and gaslight Apple for everything
- defend and any and all Chrome-only non-standards that Chrome was (and still is) churning out at ever-accelerating rate, completely ignoring any and all standards processes, or other browser vendors' input
- be completely silent on "how Google killed mobile web" and only blaming Apple
Once he went to work for Microsoft he started bashing Google, too.
The amount of grains of salt tyou need to take to read anything he writes that is not strictly technnical would cause world-wide salt deficit for any forseeable future.
Source not really it was a vibe at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nwLilQy64
and
https://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-d...
Whether it's revisionist history or not, there were later claims that Steve Jobs knew they couldn't have a native platform ready when the iPhone was first announced so they stalled for time to a) get the App Store ready and b) see what types of app ideas were popular to get those platform APIs finalized. The interim solution was web apps with recommendations to look at the Dashboard APIs in Mac OS X (which were basically web apps).
"Initially, third-party native applications were not supported. Jobs' reasoning was that developers could build web applications through the Safari web browser that 'would behave like native apps on the iPhone'"
Once it became clear the phone was desirable enough for telcos to leave it alone, he pivoted to what would give him even more control.
Even after the 1.0 release Apple went back into death march development mode to polish up a usable SDK. Even that first SDK had a tiny surface area compared all the frameworks available on the OS. It wasn't until iOS 3 that the SDK felt fully functional and not polished until iOS 4.
Web apps were a stopgap. Early iOS was just barely above an advanced demo in terms of quality and functionality. A lot of frameworks didn't even have stable APIs to release for third party developers.
Also, like, the forced carrier apps on every generic phone before the iPhone either ruined or crippled the experience of using the phone, locking you into their shitty ad-laden applications or forcing you through their terrible browsers and web portals.
To me, and several people I knew at the time - It was one of the big appeals of the iPhone that Apple had drawn a hard line at not allowing any of this.
It was 100% actually better for the consumer.
Only later was the decision made to ship a public SDK. Web apps were announced because that's the only thing third parties could use. There was no public API to speak of, just a collection of internal APIs and one-offs in individual apps.
Ex. If you can't run the Android or iOS YouTube app, what you have left is the web one... which could be amazing, but is hardly a fully functional PWA because Google would rather you used the native app.
Firefox OS would have failed all the same had it been based on Qt, or even if it was based on Java without the Android runtime and SDK.
On my iPad the "web" just works, any "m." site just adds even more whitespace than web developers seem compelled to force on viewers and raises the font size to 3x bigger than the large type books at the public library.
Web sites (say Reddit) have some banner that says it is better if you download the app, log in and all that bs, but you know it is not better for you it is better for them collecting data on you.
But really how bad it is it? I spend as little time as possible with apps on my iPad, mostly i have 6 different apps so I can occasionally do something with the "internet of things".
My take is that the web works just fine on mobile, it is PWA and push notifications which no users asked for, anyway. I mean, push notifications, does anybody really want to get more spam? The one thing I know is that everybody and his brother and his sister and all their cousins and their cousin's schoolteachers and on and on wants to send me more spam than I can handle so if Apple is saying "no spam please" isn't that fighting the good fight?
Any other games the app might be included are out side of the scope of the imaginary app in my mind.
The first popup was dismissible, so I kept swiping. Within two videos the same popup was back and it was not dismissible.
Companies intentionally cripple the web experience.
If that's the best example of a PWA, give me a badly implemented native app any day of the week and five times on Sundays.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/13/apple-mulls-opening-browser-e...
Open the Share sheet, scroll down, tap "Add to Home Screen," fill in the information, tap Add.
There are simply no users that do this, and it is not an alternative to having a mobile app in the App Store.
100%. PWAs are not a priority for Apple (and shouldn't be for developers) because users don't search for apps in web search engines, they search for them in the App Store.
I'm not even talking about bugs per se. Just the experience. I find myself constantly battling misinterpreted gestures. I try to zoom out on a page. Safari thinks I want to switch to the Tab View. I don't. Please just make the page smaller so I can see it all.
Or, I try to grab a UI slider that's positioned near the left edge of the viewport. Safari thinks I want to navigate back to the previous page. Nope. Apparently if form controls are too close to the screen's edge, they're read-only at that point?
So many gestures are overloaded now that it's a stressful thing sometimes to get it to do what I want. Being pixel-perfect with my fat dumb finger is no fun.
Are there no good PWAs that run on Android? Are there none that, though perhaps smaller is scope, run well in Safari?
People have been advocating for PWAs for a very long time now but it’s incredibly hard to get examples of good ones. There is always some complaint about Safari instead.
Yet someone the total lack of PWA success is 100% Safari’s fault.
Look at all those users I listed above. How are there no common/well known PWAs if they’re so great? People use websites like the Google Suite and Figma and such. They use web apps built as desktop apps in Electron. They use native apps.
Almost no one uses PWAs. Even if Figma or Gmail or whatever is available to be saved as a PWA it doesn’t seem to be commonly done.
There must be some other problem than Safari. It can’t be the big issue.
But a much higher percentage of the profitable market, in terms of app income.
The reason iOS and Google/Android PWAs suck is because Apple does everything in its power to make them suck:
- Complex and user-unfriendly "add-to-homescreen" functionality
- Limited/trailing functionality for native APIs
- The obnoxious url/browser bar persistent at the bottom of the page, with horrendous and uncustomizable hiding/showing of said bar.
People advocate for PWAs, but I never use them because as an end-user they're awful to use, because developers can't create them to the quality of native applications because of these limitations. Of course the complaints go to Safari in that case.
They absolutely could have PWAs be of higher quality, but they don't, for obvious reasons.
Why aren’t they on Android? Windows? Linux? MacOS?
Existing PWAs should be better known, especially in HN-like/tech circles.
But that’s not what I see.
For Windows, Linux, and MacOS, there's no real need for them, or not enough need for them to exist. There are no policies or guidelines to follow, there is no 30% tax.
The browsers people use on desktop devices provide everything that developers need and can reasonably expect of the platform. There aren't any usability differences, there are barely any performance differences, and there are barely any feature differences.
In fact, I think many desktop end-users would prefer the app to be web-based because it feels so native.
In addition, it's what another commenter said - if it can't be on iOS, then what's even the point of having one?
But users won't (and don't) go through that.
when one app is used by roughly half of all mobile users, that's not something you can ignore. so complaining about that one app when these conversations come up does not seem out of place. essentially, the conversation is something like:
- PWAs are great!
-- How well do they run on Safari?
- PWAs are great on other platforms.
-- So about half of mobile users? Doesn't seem that great to me
I’m not saying I expect PWAs to be huge, but it seems like they should be more notable PWAs if people really wanted them so bad.
TikTok aggressively funnels you into the native app for various business reasons, but the experience is well polished if they'd let you use it all the time.
Safari (really that iOS won't let you pick a different browser) has definitely been holding back the growth of PWAs though. Without decent install to home screen support (apple doesn't implement install banners for web), no push notifications, many of the native API integrations missing, it's hard to go too far down the web path before the business folks want the native app for growth angles. It's a lot more about making money than the better UX that can be had with native.
Those "native API integrations" are Chrome-only non-standards that neither Safari nor Firefox are ever going to implement.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, but never paid much attention to that corner of the company.
I wonder what those are. Because the apps where they want actual fast responsive apps with smooth animations etc. (and tracking :) ) are all native as far as I can tell.
Also mobile Web is good enough for most forms over data kind of applications.
Other than games, where Web 3D APIs are stuck in 2010, many "apps" could be easily done as mobile Web, specially all those that are basically mobile Electron.
Am I just too cynical here?
* Persistent shortcut button on device's launcher
* Notifications to pull user back into app to consume content, spend money, view ads
* Data collection like you say
* Uniquely identify user w/ device identifiers
* No browser UI and quirks
* Persistent storage on user's device
A native app can track you all the time.
Also, PWAs on apple have only "persistent" storage for 7 days.
Notifications are coming in 2023.
But the big one — access to the address book picker - is still behind an Experimental flag !!
Additionally many of the APIs are mature and haven’t changed significantly in a while, which means the body of relevant reference material online is huge — it’s not necessarily outdated just because it’s a couple years old, predating [X buzzword feature] getting added to [Y trendy JS framework] and turning popular convention upside down for the fiftieth time.
Well, that’s how it on iOS at least. It’s more murky on Android because Android Framework is kind of a mess, but it still has some advantages over the web.
It simply comes down to the fact that the user experience is not as good as native.
And you can't run a successful business without making your users happy.
[1]: https://app.starbucks.com/
[2]: https://formidable.com/work/starbucks-progressive-web-app/
Edit: just tried the Spotify pwa and it's not bad. Maybe not as good as native, but that's partly because of the big "Get App" button in the bottom right corner.
This means that while they can be good, they very often aren’t because they aren’t getting the budgets and caliber of engineering talent they’d need to be good, and so it’s much more common that they fall somewhere on the less-great side of mediocre.
Users then associate this degraded quality with web apps and disinclines them from using them, even on platforms where PWA installation is promoted (like with Edge/Chrome on Windows and Chrome on Android).
Safari’s limitations play a part too but even if Safari vanished tomorrow PWAs would continue to get lukewarm reception so long as companies aren’t putting the same kind of resources they’d put into a flagship native app into their PWAs. At the end of the day, if you cheap out you get a crap experience.
Basic messaging functionality, ...
I want native apps - they better align to my operating systems native UI/UX, are more performant, have less (potentially insecure).
Yes - Platform APIs absolutely should be made available to varying technologies where security is less of a concern, But I'll take a few high quality apps over a plethora of 'creative' web-apps any day of the week.
If you only need a website - just have a website, you don't need an "app" to order a beer at the pub.
In my experience a large majority of people that want other people to use web-apps / glorified chrome wrappers are those that write them and often (but not always) have a vested interest promoting getting their product/features out the door over quality, performance and security.
Only about half of my most used mobile apps are used online let alone 'a thin front end for remote backend'.
Bear, Obsidian, Camera, Activity / Health, Things, Photos, Pixelmator, Hue, Music, iMovie, Home, AiWriter, Prompt, Water Minder, Yomu - I use all of these primarily offline / locally.
Even the apps that are very much for use with online services aren't simply thin wrappers - they're proper applications that fetch remote data when online, store and process locally - Podcasts / Overcast, Reeder, Mail, Working Copy, 1Password (7), LunaSea, Audible, Plex etc...
And if I think about what the apps on my phone that are closer to "thin" clients - IMDB, Goodreads, Banking, LinkedIn, Amazon, Slack etc - all of which are pretty janky compared to those previously mentioned.
As a mobile dev (and sometimes web dev) I can tell you that dependencies (implicit and explicit) are numerous in even the most basic of apps.
> good luck running (timely) automated analysis across all of those let alone maintaining the dependency tree
`npm audit fix`? There's nothing even like this on Android or iOS.
Because you don't need anything remotely like this for any proper app platform. I know of a complex web app that has more than half a million entries in its yarn.lock file. Five. Hundred. Thousand. Dependencies (of dependencies of dependencies of...)
Because there's literally nothing on the web that is suitable for app development, and you have to build the entire world from scratch, one dependency at a time, every single time.
And of course npm audit fix will not fix it because in true npm fashion even a minor update can trigger cascading failures across large swaths of the code you didn't even know were pulled in.
I can't say I've seen anything like that in practice. I don't know why the app has that many dependencies, or of an analogous mobile app of similar scale and complexity to the nameless example you've cherry picked.
> Because there's literally nothing on the web that is suitable for app development, and you have to build the entire world from scratch, one dependency at a time, every single time.
Bit exaggerated, but I take your point.
The point of TFA, if we go back to that, is that ideally more functionality should be folded into the browser to reduce this redundancy. The undermining of web browsers by vested interests is precisely what makes web apps insecure in the manner you've described. And here you are defending the status quo – so it's mission accomplished from the perspective of Apple and Google.
The unseen dependencies on any mobile device are the operating system libraries, which vary from vendor to vendor, and have far greater privileges than a web app.
> And of course npm audit fix will not fix it because in true npm fashion even a minor update can trigger cascading failures across large swaths of the code you didn't even know were pulled in.
I call `npm audit fix` quite regularly and without issue. If you let it go stale, you're going to spend quite some time upgrading everything, irrespective of package management system. Can't tell you how much time I've wasted on upgrades with Gradle/SPM/Cocoapods/Carthage. So my gut says unless you either haven't spent much time in the mobile app development world, or you're being a bit disingenuous to make your point.
[1]: https://chriscoyier.net/2023/01/04/what-does-it-look-like-fo...
It is fun to write a demo in a service worker where you draw a PNG of the Mandelbrot set but for the use case where a web application caches aggressively, preloads, works offline you'd need a framework running in the web browser to implement the cache and store the documents in the web browser -- the persistent storage options are not that great.
I wish they'd provided some way to hook into the cache mechanism of the browser directly. With a good framework, application is going to tell the framework how it wants to handle loading and maintenance. Back in the day Netscape 4 was bundled with Netscape Netcaster
https://money.cnn.com/1997/04/15/technology/netscape_netcast...
which was supposed to spool an updating static news web site to your cache based on declarative configuration. They should bring it back!
I'm not against what they are trying to do, but the implementation is lacking.
From the privacy point of view service workers are yet another way you can be tracked, or by which a web application can be run "in the matrix".
> When Apple was a niche PC maker, it needed the web as a way to help potential customers de-risk the purchase of luxury computers. While it enjoyed outsized influence, the Mac never had enough share to create a sufficiently large software ecosystem w/o the web.
Just doesn’t track to me. The mac was a fairly popular native platform. Many early ios developers started out as mac developers. Macs were extremely viable for most professional users without the web.
You don't need the Facebook app to use Facebook on your phone, nor the Twitter app to use Twitter, nor the LinkedIn app... you get the idea. Your browser is perfectly capable of getting you on them, and remembering your credentials for next time.
And usually all you have to type in the URL bar is the 'f' or 't' or 'l' .
Also not having a bazillion apps on my phone using up storage.
Nearly ever other app is much worse than the web site in a mobile browser because most business just don't have the resources to build good apps.
Through the website photo uploads used my phone's native image picker which integrates with services I've chosen to use.
The app used it's own image picker which was limited to photos that were saved to my phone.
Apple takes billions from Google for them to be the default search engine. Unsure if that counts as 'dependant' or not, but it's not an insignificant amount of money, and Apple doesn't seem to be a in a hurry to give that up.
I once bemoaned Apple's insistence on WebKit; I now recognize that it's the only thing stopping the total takeover of Chrome on the Web, and a return to the dark ages of "this site works best with..."
We are there in every way other than the banner/badge being present on the website. I see no difference between today vs then from the point that one browser vendor is making browser specific hooks* that devs use that traps them into their browser.
*as in hook-line-sinker not coding hooks
What problems do you encounter?
Is this because of DRM crap, or some other reason?
It doesn't matter the why or where. If the devs made a site that only works in a specific browser, we are exactly where we were with IE6 bullshit.
Who was touting that?
Meanwhile, I use Safari 100% of the time on the desktop and haven't encountered a problem with Netflix or anything else I can think of at the moment. I'm not saying that this one example disproves your claims; nor did I demand that you "list them off one by one." But by asking for examples to check out, I could actually join you in protesting against those who publish defective sites.
P.S. I just fired up Firefox 106.0.5, went to Netflix, and started watching a movie. So... I wonder what's up on your side.
"Pardon the interruption
We're having trouble playing Netflix. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Firefox and try again. Learn more at support.mozilla.org/kb/update-firefox-latest-version. Error Code F7701-1003"
Of course, that's all non-selectable text to copy&paste, so any typo discrepancies are mine. So any type of "well, can't watch what I want to watch now" means it's broken in that browser.
This is unacceptable. I don't know about you, but I actually take the time to call out any service provider for incompetence. Not enough people do, and that's what leads to the continual degradation of service and acceptance of shit (such as "this site works best with...").
it's not that i'm giving them a pass though.
Netflix works on Firefox Mac for me.
He did used to be at Google, until 2021.
But Alex is just very much promoting the concept that Chromium be the sole standard implementation for the web.
Who's Google employee here? Looks like the poster used to work for Google but now is working for MS.
> for using the exact same anticompetitive app store strategy apple did
At least Google does allow having a third party store, thus a third party web engine. This is a significant difference.
> should be paired with regulations that ban Google from abusing its search monopoly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_cases_against_Google...
EU is well aware of this and periodically collecting lots of fines from Google for doing so. I don't remember the EU applying the same level of antitrust regulations for Apple, though it paid a lot for Double Irish arrangement.
Meanwhile, I've never used a Twitter, Mastodon, or Reddit mobile app, for example. Also, Android keeps disabling permissions on mobile apps I haven't used for months.
There are a few mobile apps I use frequently. (Mostly from Google.) For everyone else, I'm not going to install your app.
WebGPU might finally get released this year, just in time to catch up with where Vulkan, DirectX and Metal were in 8 years ago, while forcing everyone to rewrite all their shaders.
I've come to the conclusion that the browser shoudl have become a virtual machine host where every tab was its own VM. Then at least we could run normal apps on the web without WASM.
No, I don't want Fuchsia, that's just another OS on top of the 3 we have, with significant restrictions. It was really just a tool for Google to have more power over Android developers and hardware manufacturers.
Exactly the reason why the web sucks: chasing the wrong targets and ignoring what is actually needed for development.
Just having proper controls is several orders of magnitude more helpful than having yet another way of building graphics from scratch. Too bad https://open-ui.org/ is twenty years too late.
It’s almost like they’re in cahoots.
When they are so bad, either maliciously or not, that one would rather download an app or wait until a desktop browser is available, one has to wonder.
What does this statement even mean?
In this era (~'98-'12), the web provided a bridge over a moat formed by a competitor's proprietary stack winning through momentum and network effects. The web went "over the top" of both Macs and PCs, and while Apple desperately coveted native app builders for the Mac, was at least savvy enough to know that if it could add the universe of great web apps to the Mac experience, it would be a market-reality help at point of sale.
But lack of software wasn't an issue for websites, since Safari could, in theory, run any website as well as any Windows computer could.
Promote standards as an incumbent, then closed solutions once you reach a sufficient market share.
Example:
- Already shipped in Chrome and advertised https://web.dev/webtransport/
- Status: Working Draft https://www.w3.org/TR/webtransport/ which means it not even close to being a standard (see why here: https://www.w3.org/2021/Process-20211102/#w3c-recommendation...)
Up to the early 90s, most households didn't have computers; but when the Internet became mainstream from mid 90s onwards, more and more people bought computers to "use the Internet".
If Apple wouldn't have an offering/environment which allows for using the Internet (... Network stack, browser, e-mail client, dialup drivers, etc.), people would avoid buying Apple computers.
But I try my best to not install any apps that I don't consider necessary. I feel everyone wants to push an app for what could be achieved trivially with a website (looking at you Xfinity).
Is "being in the appstore" worth that much because it's starting to be the primary thing people search when they're looking for something instead of Google?
No, you build a sizable userbase and sell out to some unscrupulous buyer who backdoors the app in a future update.
... track you a bit better and get paid a bit more easily (if with a hefty tax), but more importantly, they can be on the Home screen of users, which people will look at a billion times per day.
Yes you can bookmark a website - and nobody does, it gets buried in some submenu you don't even know how to bring back up. Yes you can pin a bookmark on the Home screen, but people don't know how - and even if they did, they likely wouldn't get a nice icon, and it would launch an irrelevant browser interface around it, and it would all feel a bit crappy.
Whereas, people know very well how to install an app. They'll automatically get a nice big logo on their home screen, and when they tap it the magic will happen as it's supposed to be. The big logo will remind them every other minute that they might want to access the service. Etc etc.
I find it absurd when people complain about taxes, but it's fine when a company taxes us for profit...
Web sites are the second best; proprietary apps should be the last resort.
Password managers provide a means of autofill with FaceID, which is the next best thing. This is how I log in to most native apps too.
for an app with wifi permissions it's trivial, but there is no API to do this through a browser so we're stuck downloading an app
i probably would not grant full network permissions to an app anyway
At the time I thought that Firefox was wasting resources on development on Firefox OS. But now I think I was wrong. Firefox could see the promise of a PWA (Progressive Web Apps) mobile future, but the tech was clumsy and immature. Perhaps Firefox OS was too early for the technology?
React Native made this a little easier, but it definitely did not mean “write once, run anywhere”. (It’s more like, write a half that runs everywhere and another half that’s split between your target platforms)
After using RN a bunch, I’ve found there are times when it shines and other times when it’s best to defer to the native language, but I keep using RN because it reminds me most of what I love about the web:
The best “write it once run anywhere” platform I’ve used to date.
For example, I had a project last year where the app will communicate via Bluetooth to a portable printer to be used for the factory workers. I'm not sure if the web technologies can handle this.
Perhaps they weren't competitive enough to be interesting to users which is why we have this situation in the first place. These alternatives tried and failed. The only functioning alternative that is still alive is SailfishOS by Jolla which even that is almost no where to be seen anywhere. It's almost as if they are not trying hard enough.
The real winner here is Google which will go in the same route as Apple when they deploy Fuchsia on Chromebooks and Android phones which Chrome will essentially further dominate the web. Alternatives like Firefox have little to no chance at competing even with EU DMA which that just further entrenches Chrome's dominance.
As a happy owner of Librem 5 and Pinephone, I respectfully disagree.
https://v8.dev/blog/code-caching-for-devs
https://github.com/thlorenz/v8-perf/blob/master/snapshots%2B...
it's is a contraction of it+is; e.g. it's good = it is good, c.f. he's good = he is good, she's good = she is good.
its is the possessive; e.g. its mouth is open, c.f. his mouth is open, her mouth is open. (ours, yours, theirs)
The consistent misuse of punctuation had been pretty jarring.
THE killer feature for native apps is that it takes a wide range of security concerns completely off the table.
The browser is a pretty safe, controlled, and locked down environment for executing arbitary code from untrusted parties.
Why aren't we there yet?
I'm excited by https://qutebrowser.org/ It seems very user-driven but it's niche users which doesn't quite include me.
If Apple hates a browser monoculture so much, they should have let Mozilla release Firefox (actual firefox) on iOS. There were ports ready to go multiple times but they love their walled garden lockdown too much. It was to their favor back when WebKit dominated the mobile web, but oops, they didn't invest enough in the platform!
FWIW I think if Safari had been released as a first-tier Windows browser, they might have been able to hold on and fight off Chrome together with Firefox. But they didn't put the effort in.
Perhaps he is right. Even with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), Chrome will just end up be the dominant browser on iOS.
At this point Google should just spin out the Chromium engine as a separate non-profit organization and allowing others to freely make their own browsers based on a standard browser engine like Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi etc to use it but done freely without Google's complete control, just like what the Linux Kernel has done with 'distros' with the kernel as the central standard for anyone to freely make their own Linux distro.
Firefox has its chance to do that, but were too lazy and begged for Google's money and have done little to nothing to competing against Chrome's dominance and are just complaining when they are just not competitive enough whilst the market didn't care and moved on.
SCNR…
> - Writing it as many times as platforms you want to support
> - Using some middle-man software to write-once-compile-everywhere
Weeeeeeeell, there's also a third option that a lot of game developers/engines use: write most of your code in cross-platform C/C++ as an object file and write platform-specific loaders that do the OS-specific bits to start your program, load your object file, and call your main entry point. It's not that bad.
It's really the OS's that get nasty about adding more and more layers between our programs and the hardware they run on. Some of that is for good reason: ie security or debugging. But some aren't: vendor lock in, user tracking, backdoors.
I get that some people dont want to have this experience. But this here is using the medium as intended. It fits in the scene & participates actively with others, in a way that going-off-and-doing-your-own-isolated-thing (then linking to it) doesnt.
It'd be so nice if we didnt have to keep having this debate every single time. There's advantages to both. Recognizing & accepting that different things can be happening in the world & that you should maybe have a little flexibility about it seems like the mature response I'd hope for.
I dont think it applies nearly as much to this grass-roots, open-source, distributed, protocols & standards based form. People want a way to talk, converse, connect. Sure there's ways to do it badly, for bad cause, with bad incentive, but this is & most activity on ActivityPub reads as dielectic. As an exploration & search for truth, a desire to understand ourselves, each otger, and the worlds about us better.
For sure, we can use communication & connectivity poorly. Are unwilling to imagine though that connection can be a force for good? ActivityPub here is a very very early attempt to create standards where we can explore & innovate, and hopefully some of those fronts indeed show promise of good, for raising up & improving... not just amplifying the rash, the base, the overly emotional, the manipulators.
At some point we have to be willing to get beyond the long long long scapegoating & demonizing we've done. We have had very convenient targets to hang the blame on. Maybe less is the only answer, the only possibly, & hope of ever being better is foolish & mistaken, but I hope we can at least entertain that as a question, a possibility, & not act with- ahem- rash emotional fear-based certainty. This seems like a new path where we can be involved enough, have the decisions available, to start pioneering im the addition of responsibility & moderation to our social systems. That possibility excites me, and I hope we can agree is worth trying.
Are there other avenues for hope you see? What else might possibly be worthy?
Welll...
> (all the arguments are other features that may be missing in blogs, not arguments against having a cohesive post that doesn't spread across multiple messages)
Ok that's a pretty big category of exclusions. I can maybe picture a blog which is actually a number of subresources with distinct urls in it, where as we go down the page the url keeps updating itself. I can maybe imagine commenting per section. I can maybe imagine ActivityPub readers that can show the top resource & let folks expand the remainder if interested. I can recreate a better more featureful more complex medium, if I drastically rebuild what a page is/how it works.
There's a dozen structural advantages to using the web like a hyper-medium, not just a long scroll of paper. Yes we can try to import those features onto the virtual long-scroll-of-paper. But why? Many people like this hyper-medium. Im sorry but I think the pro-blog people need to fix their own problems & build better clients. Assimilate yourself & stop being petulant, acknowledge the superior medium that is more capable, and for god sake, start building some clients that hide all the stuff that you find so so bothersome to yourselves so you can please be less miserable people.
Not saying you're wrong, but... if it was a blog wouldn't that "native app" be a browser?
>> Also makes it easier for such readers to share, increasing the post/thread's reach
I think this is a big part of it; it's not about connecting with a few deeply, but many shallow connections. I'd argue that these authors care more about the sharing than the communication aspects TBH.
But they come across the content scrolling through a social feed. They'd need to click a link, that opens a new tab (with goodness knows how many ads), to read the content.
I'm not sure if this outweighs the different reading experience, but that ability makes for something which is fundamentally different, rather than being a strictly worse version of a blog.
Agree, it's interactive. It's built to involve you and the audience in a very democratically equal way. Everything is a conversation instead of a soliloquy (blog).
HN also offers the same conversational interaction (with much better moderation). It's what pulls us in. It's interesting to see that every comment on HN, for example, is also an original, stand-alone post where you too become an author on this system : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34252904 : it's very balanced for all participants.
It's hard not to get pulled in by this conversational aspect on Twitter (and similar) when you have (1) a voice and (2) it's generally built to be equal within the system (if we gloss over some issues created by the number of followers that give some users a much greater voice). There's a sense of ownership that comes with this.
With blogs it is hard to respond to just part of it - and it is hard to respond in most blog comment systems. Twitter solves both of those problems.
I say this as someone with a custom blog written in custom HTML/CSS/JS.
If it makes you feel better a lot of people are creating substacks, with no intent to monetize, to act as their blog.
(I had assumed the latter, but maybe not?)
(For example, notorious thread-poster Foone elaborates on their process/why threads work for them here: https://foone.tumblr.com/post/700185724820078592/one-of-my-f...)
Tweet chains have a rhythm, no ads (with a decent client) and no filler.
Blogs (and worse: podcasts or videos) are full of fluff and filler, and often packed with ads.
Ultimately, it's because that's where the readers that they care about are.
And sure, they could post a link in a tweet. But I suspect that results in much less engagement than a tweet storm.
Don't get me wrong - I hate it too. But don't hate the player, hate the game.
B) In this specific case, the author has written a lot of blog posts about this domain (though not this specific subject), and those have been on HN frontpage occasionally. So whatever reason they had to use Mastodon for this writing, it at least wasn't coming from ignorance or a lack of a platform.
In my opinion at least.
The guideline is not that the form is not annoying - some people, like you, will find it annoying not matter what. It's that the complaints about it are boring, repetitive and corrosive to the forum just as any boring and repetitive thing is. That's very much a slam dunk of truth.
multimillenial standard interface for connected text
This is pretty ahistorical.
I'm not arguing that the guideline can be breached when some people find it annoying. That would be silly.
I'm arguing that posting articles as trains of social media posts may not be tangential nor merely a matter of formatting. If that's the case (I agree it's 'arguable'), then complaining about them isn't in breach of the guidelines.
> This is pretty ahistorical.
Claiming that posting multiple social media objects is a mere 'formatting' alteration to our legacy of textual culture is pretty ahistorical.
It is, the guideline was written specifically to address the repetitive twitter complaints - you can find this explanation in the mod commentary. Also, pretty much anything repetitive runs counter to the rubric of the forum and this complaint is very, very repetitive.
our legacy of textual culture
Our 'legacy of textual culture' contains a huge variety of formats and representations. The notion that some single one is a representative standard, let alone has lasted for millennia is not an accurate one.
If the guidelines are unclear, and arbitrarily rule non-articles in as articles, then they must be rewritten to make the fiat clear.
> Our 'legacy of textual culture' contains a huge variety of formats and representations. The notion that some single one is a representative standard, let alone has lasted for millennia is not an accurate one.
Irrelevant, as no-one made that claim. Your unevidenced insistence on your personal take on a novel tech as inarguably part of a historical tradition is just quiet shouting. I disagree, but agree it's arguable. You think it's not arguable, because it's obvious to you, and you believe what's obvious to you should be enforced.
Hence the clarification. Hopefully it's clear now.
no-one made that claim.
You made the claim - "the multimillenial standard interface for connected text". There's no such standard.
Nope. Just that you personally rule something as tangential that I claim is not. Your personal preferences aren't present in the guidelines (I've read them). If you wish them to be so, please rewrite the guidelines.
> You made the claim
I did not. I claimed that there is such a thing as textual articles, ie. an existential claim. I didn't claim that all text, or all articles, or all textual articles, share a single format. They exist, and claiming that something entirely different (a chain of social media objects) falls under the same head is false. Claiming that two different categories of things are, in fact, different, is not 'tangential', or related only to 'formatting'.
Oh I see the problem. No, I'm not personally claiming this, I'm trying to explain the context and motivation of the site guidelines. Here are some relevant comments from the site moderator:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838162
and in endless glory:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The guideline is there because of the repetitive twitter complaints, I'm not making this up as a fun messageboard hypothetical. Complaining about tweets being on twitter is a well-established off-topic topic.
please rewrite the guidelines
That is impractical for a number of reasons (i.e. the guidelines can't be exhaustive and also aren't, by design) which, coincidentally is also a subject of much moderator commentary. Happy to dig it up for you if interested.
I did not.
I mean, you talked about this millennial-something standard but there's obviously no such a standard. That's all. I'm happy to accept it as a rhetorical flourish and move on.
> The guideline is there because of the repetitive twitter complaints, I'm not making this > up as a fun messageboard hypothetical. Complaining about tweets being on twitter is a > well-established off-topic topic.
This is very obviously untrue. Almost every single thread in HN is littered with repetitive comments. Try posting anything about Linux, note-taking. Dare mention an Electron app, and if it's installed with an install.sh, then .. instant death. You'll be buried under an avalanche of near exact copies of comments that have been posted tens of thousands of times on HN.
This is manifest bad faith on the part of the mods in general or pvg in particular: an individual dislike on their part of this particular repetitive complaint, which prompted a vague guideline with plausible deniability in mind.
These aren't the kind of judiciously-applied guidelines I could willingly sign up to. Unfortunately we're not permitted to delete accounts here, so I'll remove my email address, log out, and stay out of the comments.
I'm a regular user here, I don't permit or not permit things. Click on the timestamp of a comment next time to reply to it if the reply button is hidden.
This is very obviously untrue
I mean, complaining about things being on twitter is offtopic on HN which I've gone to exhaustive and exhausting lengths to explain. You can't just declare it untrue, that would be, as you say, a personal preference of yours rather than the reality.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's worth knowing that HN is a common law system, not a civil law one: there's the guidelines page, and then there's a long history of moderator interpretations and addenda, and to grok the totality of our rules, you need both. Think of the guidelines like the Constitution, and Dan as the Supreme Court.
Edit
This comment was originally snottier and stated that someone had already posted the mod comment link, but, nope, I was just wrong about that, and I do apologize. Chagrin is a powerful decongestant and so I'll be less snotty in the future.
You weren't, it just that this thread got a little out of whack with the self-reply-because-reply-link-was-hidden thing.