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Comment by samspot | Hacker News Reader

A lot of sites are still supporting old browsers like ie7/8, which means they have to lower their tech to the lowest common denominator. So it's not too surprising that it feels the same, especially if you happen to be browsing in one of them!

Having to support old tech lengthens development and testing time quite a bit. We need more browser features so we can write less code, only write it once, and distribute self-contained components.

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First of all, you don't distribute self-contained components, you distribute text, markup, and media. The browser renders it. Second, how much technology do you think we need to do this? Should we be talking to NASA? Third, supporting old tech is important and inevitable.

A website is literally just text and pictures. And video. That's it. We really don't need it to be so massively complicated, to suck up so many resources, and to be such a security nightmare.

In 20 years, your browser will probably use a gigabyte or two of ram minimum, require four CPU cores, and consist of several hundred thousand lines of code - maybe a million.

To render text.

>A website is literally just text and pictures. And video. That's it.

And CSS, which supports transform and animation and is inching towards Turing completeness, and javascript, and maybe HTML5/Canvas and WebGL.

Like as not, we seem to be converging towards a point where websites are as much applications as documents.

.... which is exactly what I propose is the problem. Those are the extra features that we bought at the cost of users' security and privacy. Even if those are desirable features, it's not clear that they should be a part of the web rather than an orthogonal distribution mechanism. Even if they are desired to be a part of the web, it's not clear that it was worth it to prioritize them over the security and privacy of users' systems.

It's not clear because it's subjective. You and I would prefer if security and privacy were more prioritized, but the reality is that services that put an emphasis on such things have been available for decades, and they have been a flop outside of very specific audiences.

I'm not saying this excuses the industry, but that doesn't change incentives. If you want more secure services, you need to change the preferences of the users.

I don't think that is true. We had security and privacy problems before we had extra features. These problems will always exist, whether we innovate on other stuff or not.

> First of all, you don't distribute self-contained components, you distribute text, markup, and media.

Yes and that is one of the exciting innovations being worked on right now, web components. That's exactly why I brought it up.

Some websites are just text and pictures, it is true. We call them brochure-ware. But not the sites I work on. I build applications for managing your entire business. They are just text in pictures in the same way that a PC is just text and pictures. Should we halt innovation on computers in general? NASA's flight control systems are really just calculators if you break it down as you have done with the web.

At the worst you sound anti-technology, and at best, snobbish about your area of specialty. Implying that whatever you work on is important, but things others work on are 'just text'.

> At the worst you sound anti-technology,

Aah, a Luddite, seize him!

Maybe it's not anti-technology as much as anti-cram-everything-into-the-browser. Some people think that full-fledged applications should be kept out of the browser, but that doesn't mean that they think that full-fledged applications shouldn't exist at all.

> We need more browser features so we can write less code, only write it once, and

throw it all away and rewrite it all again in two years when even newer features get added to the browsers!

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