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History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. One upon a dark age, we had mainframes and dumb terminals. Then came the first age of the PC - let's pull everything to the client. Then came servers and "thin clients". With faster processors and cheaper storage came the second age of the PC, with only the permanent data storage left on the server. As the Internet grew, centralization came back: web services and the cloud, with clients just serving dumb web pages.

And now we see the beginning of a migration back to client-side computation and storage.

Somehow, though, this latest iteration doesn't make a lot of sense. It's hard enough maintaining data consistency on a web service that may be used by hundreds or thousands of people. Imagine when this data is cached in microdatabases in unreliable browsers.

On top of that, the browser makes an absolutely horrible programming environment for client-side apps. For the programming part, Javascript is an poor language, so you wind up using heavy-duty frameworks like React to make it tolerable. For the UI representation, that's just not what HTML/CSS were ever meant for. So you get frameworks there as well. Young developers think this is just the way it is. No actually, it's more like the worst of all possible worlds. Using something like JavaFX or (I know, I know) even Visual Basic, you can produce a functional, robust UI with a tiny fraction of the effort.

years and years ago on a C++ forum someone made an observation that was eerily similar to yours. I still remember it to this day as it stuck in my head.

They made an observation that our industry goes in cyclical centralize/de-centralize cycles and that we we were (at the time) entering into a centralization cycle.

Now here I am reading a comment that we're going back into a de-centralization cycle and I wouldn't be surprised if you're the same poster.

probably 15-20 years ago (maybe more?) I made a prediction that I still think will come true.

The OS will become the "browser" and applications will run directly on the OS and will access local resources through standardized interfaces. WebAssembly and things like WebGL are already moving us in that direction. Honestly HTML5 was the first time I recognized standard updates as moving us towards that reality with things like localStorage, etc.

I honestly think if someone more imaginative had the helm at MS when the cloud started getting big they would have eaten google's lunch by leveraging their desktop dominance into the web. Instead they dd inane things like display websites on the desktop (win98 IIRC).

Could be - I've been making this observation for a long time. The cycles keep going. On the other hand, probably lots of other people have commented on it as well...

You may be right about the browser becoming the OS. Chromebooks were already a step in that direction. But JS/HTML/CSS really is a horrible combination for application programming. If the browser does become the OS, can we please get decent technology to work with?

I expect we'll get back to native applications and move away from js/html/css.

HTML and CSS aren't too horrible as foundational tech. CSS needs a little work, but both allow for a lot of good abstractions. They may be some of the best platform we've ever had.

They are bad at just being directly programmable targets.

Html and css are probably the best, easiest and most effective ui toolkits ever. Name one which is better.

> make the browser a full blown VM and just write normal programs that run in it

This is actually happening, albeit slowly, with recent efforts around WASM etc. If you want a fun hypothetical of where this all goes, check out the talk "The Birth & Death of JavaScript". Link here: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

You’re not wrong, but the web won because it had a superior delivery system: URLs. Everything weird about the web era of development has been about contorting everything to be URL-oriented.

But consider how WASM is now turning the browser into an app delivery client. Not a “html and json bodged into an app”, but a real honest to god app.

This project happens to be browser based because that’s convenient place to put a WASM app, and it has a decent presentation layer. But it doesn’t have to be!

Not just delivery, but also security. Browsers offer a level of isolation and safety that you generally don't get with native desktop apps. Things like iOS do bridge the gap a bit more though

> Browsers offer a level of isolation and safety that you generally don't get with native desktop apps.

They didn't originally: Java <applets> and ActiveX <objects> originally weren't sandboxed and had free run of the visitor's computer.

All major OSes today now have built-in support for process/app sandboxing. I suppose if the "rich client" frontend model (WPF, etc) was more popular then I expect desktop OS application isolation to have been introduced much sooner.

Security development happens where the market demands it, and rarely does it happen where it's actually needed.

I can't speak for ActiveX since I avoided IE like the plague, but Java applets were sandboxed. Just that the sandbox had a lot of holes.

Huh - you're right: http://www.securingjava.com/chapter-two/

They don't, though. Browsers are almost trivial to exploit.

There have been seven (7) 0day exploits in Chrome this year (that we know of). Know how many CVEs there were for Chrome in total in 2023? Two-hundred and forty (240). That's impressive. And this is the browser people brag about as being secure.

> Anyone remember when "frontend applications" were actual applications and not web pages?

I do. And also I remember building those apps. It was not as simple as building webapps today.

Yes, there are downsides to this model (a lot of them) BUT you can whip up a simple app with a beautiful UI in a couple of hours today. It was not like that 25 years ago.

> It's insane how much of the world's engineering effort and technology investment money has gone into putting lipstick on a pig.

I'm a JavaScript developer and yes, this is deeply disturbing. Even more so after I built a framework [1] that just copycats what PHP/Rails does (treat the server like a server, and the client/browser like a client—no SPA spaghetti). It works, it's fast, and makes development 100x easier.

I applied the same heuristic to deployments, eschewing all of the containers dogma and lo and behold, you can achieve great performance (and iterative speed) with old school, minimal tech (bare metal/VPS and just install deps and code directly on the machine).

[1] https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick

I completely agree with you, I'm going to copy part of another comment I made

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probably 15-20 years ago (maybe more?) I made a prediction that I still think will come true.

The OS will become the "browser" and applications will run directly on the OS and will access local resources through standardized interfaces. WebAssembly and things like WebGL are already moving us in that direction. Honestly HTML5 was the first time I recognized standard updates as moving us towards that reality with things like localStorage, etc.

I honestly think if someone more imaginative had the helm at MS when the cloud started getting big they would have eaten google's lunch by leveraging their desktop dominance into the web. Instead they did inane things like display websites on the desktop (win98 IIRC).

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What I find annoying is the still-existing problem that sometimes apps don't load properly and you have to refresh the browser. You don't get this with desktop apps. There are some caching capabilities in browsers but they are not being used by anyone to cache app code and resources. If I'm using an app for the first time it should properly load all code and resources or else report an error.

I totally agree! I would love a VM designed for development simplicity & performance that is built with a standard protocol & interface for accessing arbitrary VM applications over the net.

I won't forget that someone at Google didn't have the courage to enable Dart in Chrome as a successor to Javascript. And someone killed SQLLite as a in-browser db.