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A platform smelling bad is not a boolean flag. Almost every platform smells less than the web as far as actually using it goes; the web is just ubiquitous and frictionless as far as deployment.

"You want it (the browser) to be a mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101." -- Alan Kay

There are a lot of people who are very angry about this.

Yeah, and it's unreasonable anger. The browser is flawed in many ways, but it's awesome that we have this universal platform and we should cherish it, rather than moaning about how something "better" should have won.

> we should cherish it, rather than moaning about how something "better" should have won.

There are certainly incentives for which that may be true. There is also the impending, monumental investment of effort into what is necessarily only a local maximum.

Are there alternative proposals at this point anyway?

It's a bit less "awesome" than most people think.

The point is, now that we've taken something that was originally intended for viewing documents over the network and turned it haphazardly into something we realized that we actually wanted (running applications portably and with frictionless installation), we'd better design something from scratch that does what we want without all the unbearable cruft that comes with browsers, HTML and HTTP.

So what we really wanted was Java?

If applets weren't terrible, maybe.

You're forgetting that having everyone use your new thing is the main feature.

Redesigning everything from scratch, you lose the single thing that was special about it: adoption.

That lot of people doesn't really matter. They prefer to complain than to embrace what the browsers offer today.

They can even compile their favorite scripting language for asm.js, but there will always be excuses:

  > But I want native GC
  > But I want native Speed
  > But I want native _________

They'd rather die waiting for the perfect conditions than getting things done.

There is absolutely no reason they (I) can't complain about the effort going into browsers that could be going into a better solution, and still take advantage of the browser at the same time.

If nobody complains about the status quo even when it's awesome, we'll never move out of the current local maximum.

I'm not against complaining, but people often forget that the web is incrementally updating, today's web is different than 2014's web, and different than 2013's web, and absolutely different than 2003's web.

The fact that there aren't perfect conditions today doesn't mean that the conditions won't improve tomorrow.

There's tons of effort going into alternatives, but it has largely gone to waste because those alternatives lack adoption, and probably always will.

Focus on what we have, not what we might have had if history had gone differently.

Reinventing the wheel to fix minor issues is rarely worth the effort.

Experiments are rarely a waste of effort just because they don't turn into something bigger; Focus on what we can have, not what we might have had.

Reinventing the wheel for "minor" issues (or just for fun!) is what gave us Linux, LLVM+Clang, Go/Rust/Nim/etc., Newton's laws, Relativity, etc. Incremental changes are not the only way, nor always the best way, to make progress.

>There are a lot of people who are very angry about this.

Could "woah" or someone else explain this to me? (And please don't make a snarky response, this is a sincere question from a someone who is ignorant of the dynamic at work here.)

The browser, JS, etc. have various flaws and forms of cruft accumulated over the years, and weren't originally designed specifically for the purpose of writing applications.

Of course, alternatives all have flaws and cruft, too, just different ones.

Thanks for your response.

So they are angry because it is a "hack" that actually affects them in some way or it one of those religious things?:

1. "I'm angry 'cause you're doing it wrong."

2. "Because open source"

3. Something only dogs can hear.

4. ???

Well, the web has certain limitations (which are slowly being dealt with, but they exist nonetheless).

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