I know this sounds bad, but maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Necessity is the mother of invention and maybe browser technology should be funded by governments instead of privately owned advertising megacorps?
Oh no, where will Apple and MS find the money to continue development!
Yeah but what about the other one?
The only one with a different web browser engine? The only one that is actural competition?
Nice. Maybe Mozilla will learn to walk by themselves (spoiler: they won’t).
This is great in my opinion. Web browsers are infernally complicated and need to be simplified. CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess. I would love to see large swathes of both of them eliminated from existence, and maybe the maintenance burden leaves a very small chance that we could start to see some of these technologies starting to get dropped. I personally would love to see web components disappear most of all.
Regardless, Google really fucked over the web when they decided to add all these unnecessary technologies to Chrome. No doubt a EEE strategy to take over all browser development on the web. Something should have been done much earlier about it, but now we’ll have to see how this mess gets sorted out.
Nobody can make a successful browser that is simpler. The moment a user hits a website that no longer works, they are going back to their old browser.
All these new features exist because websites replaced every single program most people used. Web browser now have to be capable of doing anything pretty well. It’s not some grand conspiracy to take over the internet, it’s providing the features devs want so they can deliver the things they want in the modern multiplatform no-install world.
All these new features exist because websites replaced every single program most people used. Web browser now have to be capable of doing anything pretty well.
Which means that simple cross-platform scripting languages with graphical abilities should have been more popularized.
I discovered tcl/tk for myself recently and it’s just wonderful. A 12 years old me would be capable to learn it, if I knew about it.
What the web browser does well is a sandbox to protect you from all the tits and dicks and “pay us 42 bitcoins” messages. People are afraid of running programs from random sources, but not of visiting random webpages.
So the products they need are a simplified web browser and a sandboxed environment for running things downloaded from it. What we have. Just separated, cause the former is too important to be affected by customer requirements of the latter.
It’s about 100 billion times either to create GUI using Godot than HTML + Javascript + CSS.
Try Tk. It’ll be faster or as fast as that, I guarantee that.
What is Tk?
I may be a layman with regards to this, can someone explain to me the thinking behind the DoJ’s proposal and why they think it’s for the common good.
Monopolies are bad enough by themselves. But with google they own such a large part of the day to day web browsing experience it’s amazing it’s not worse than it already is.
- YouTube has documented cases of effectively throttling non-chrome browsers.
- There is a lot of juicy user behaviour data that can be gathered directly from chrome to support Google’s AD network.
- Google bank roll a lot of the web technologies that run websites, giving chrome an edge to implement new tech earlier and better than the competition.
- They also own Android, and unlike windows, they don’t even give you a pop up in what browser you want to use.
- They also don’t only control Chrome, but they are giving out the chromium (the web engine under the hood). So now they effectively control Brave, Edge, Opera, and any other browser that runs on chromium. And wouldn’t you know it, they heavily nerfed ad blockers capabilities in chromium to increase Googles ad revenue.
So I spent two days hacking together a Gemini client script in tcl/tk. It’s near 700 lines already, some of those are dead weight (client certs, stuck cause pki module in tcllib doesn’t know of hashing algorithms newer than sha256), but it’s usable for reading pages, viewing images, saving either and answering prompts, with basic history. A fully functional client is supposed to be doable in 1-2 days in like 200 lines of code in something. So it’s a clumsy mess.
And yes, it feels like it’s a lot of what we need web for. Suppose I got client certs working and this were a Gemini service. I’d follow a link saying “post something”, I’d type this comment into a prompt and send the request, and on the next update it would be here, right under CN from my client cert used as nickname. One could have such links under every comment. One could build threads.
So maybe yes.
I don’t want web browsers to be changing all the time forcing me to do updates. Software that is complete doesn’t need to be changed just for the sake of change.
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The vast majority of it is not “security development”. There are just screwing around with perfectly good software, sometimes making it worse, because they have a large staff of developers they are paying a salary to.
