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Comment by xk_id | Hacker News Reader

Every day we stray further from using the web to deliver documents.

It's pretty clear at this point that the web also being a universal zero-installation-required sandboxed application runtime is a much more exciting vision than if it was restricted to only documents.

Why, because you can charge for cramming 50 MB of tracking JavaScript down the pipe to people paying $10 a month for the privilege?

Only if you suck at making web apps.

(Admittedly a lot of people suck at making web apps.)

I used to feel a lot more excitement in 2000 than i feel now.

In year 2000, we were around 24 years younger and the web was still an undeveloped plot of land for kids to play.

Now, it’s mostly a corporate canvas for economic transactions, like the rest of the human experience in the west

The dot-com bubble would like to have a word with you.

That honestly sounds like a you issue, not a browser issue.

I would have killed for the capabilities web browsers have now back in 2000. I was forced to build Java applets to get anything close, and the user experience sucked.

But the user experience sucks far more today. People are opting out. That’s how bad it is.

Websites today offer little over the ones from 15-20 years ago functionality-wise. In fact they have less features in the name of 'simplicity' that results in their being bloated memory hogs with javascript.

It’s maybe an exciting vision, but the existing web tech stack is woefully mismatched for that.

> is a much more exciting vision

"Exciting" doesn't necessarily mean "good", though!

All that stuff is hacked in, and that fact constantly reads it's head. So much that we are still debating solutions thirty years later.

And from using proper native frameworks for desktop applications.

It shows that web technologies were not designed to do what they do today.

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