alt Hacker NewsI know it tends to be an unpopular opinion, but to me the Web is too much, really.
Many people (me included) like to complain about how systemd is trying to overtake everything, but browsers are a lot worse than that. Even if I can realistically choose my OS today, I have to run most apps in a browser. And the browser landscape is not that nice in terms of freedom: Google controls it through Chromium, Apple manages to force their users to use Webkit, and Firefox... is marginal.
More than that: I can realistically assemble my own OS, that is actually feasible. The one tricky component that I will need to integrate, though, is the browser. And the browser landscape, again, is totally controlled by BigTech.
Pushing for webapps is pushing to lock us into Chromium, controlled by Google. I don't see what's great in shipping a copy of Chromium embedded in a webapp and calling that a "desktop app".
I want control and diversity. The Web is far from there, and for some reason people love that.
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Ladybird is another web browser in the works that is a completely separate engine from chromium and webkit.
Native apps have their place, but the average everyday user is becoming more and more hostile to the idea of installing an application and just using their existing web browser to accomplish the same task. I know I would rather use my limited SSD space for photos, games, and movies, than 100 different apps. Also supporting hundreds of different pieces of hardware isn't economical for most projects. The web solves both problems in that it gets your app into the hands of users immediately and you can delegate the responsibility of supporting various hardware to the browser vendors.
Google also doesn't own the web contrary to popular belief (Even if they have an outsized amount of influence). The web is an open standard, anyone could hack together their own browser if they wanted to with enough time and effort. That amount prior to the AI era was so large, only a shop like Google, Firefox, or Apple could put in the time and effort required to make one, and the amount of time of effort that requires is falling significantly day-by-day due to LLM generated code.
to be clear to everyone running into this: we've had libertarian software politics like this for decades. "i don't want any software i cant drown in my bathtub and then also make myself again, preferrably still in my bathtub". or something like that.
i find it ridiculously uncompelling. it's always felt not like a well formed grounded way to be. it's amazing that we have really good capable platforms that can help us. especially when there are multi-polar orgs like w3c and what and lately wicg that serve as stewarts, that watch over these platforms. when there are often ietf tie ins. when there are projects like interop that help move the platform forward across browsers, agree on the baseline.
what's so viciously deeply libertarian coded to me about this assessment is it's me me me me me. what can i do? what can i make? what software can i build? with some notes of fear to tell you google is bad. beware google. i realize the anti-google sentiment is super strong in the world, but after being around the web for decades i can hardly say what thanks and joy and celebration i have to google for building the ultimate existential hedge against everyone else: a free platform for the free world that runs free on endless devices, that is the only free platform the world has ever seen with any success. that has gotten vastly better.
i think at this point and for half a decade plus on HN the "I know it tends to be an unpopular opinion" is thanks for the web and google. i think i'm in the minority for my thanks. i think the outrage and dismisal and scare words is by far the most popular stance.
but what's on the other hand? native apps, on native platforms? those things that run on 20% of computers, that you have to be a licensed paid up authorized developer to ship to, that have very long queues for submitting your app to to maybe some day have it approved perhaps?
the libertarian view is what you can do. yeah, the super small, the do it yourself. it's a fantasy.
the mature societal view is what we can do. it's having this permissionless platform that anyone can build software for. it's having Project Fugu trying to make that platform competitive, good, capable: giving hte native platform a constant run for the money. so that we all can benefit. so that any dev can make an app. it's "extensible web manifesto", where the web doesn't bake in particular flavors of software development, so we can choose jquery or backbone or react or vue or solid or svelte or lit, so society can iterate and keep refining and re-deciding what surface they want to program to, what models fit them, what they want to program against: you don't see that with native platforms! you get what they are and that's mostly that!
you get such a wide ranging low level platform, such freedom to use it as you please on the web. but much much much more, everyone else can enjoy it too. it's a civilized platform, the only civilized one where we have control, where we the world has say. if you don't like the native platforms, well, you can remake something else, but it'll be you and your couple friends perhaps amid the 7b people who are still using either the web or what big companies gave them.
the libertarian sees what they can do. but i'm really interested in what we can do. and there's nothing like the web for this. as developers, as users, as users in-between user-scripting or writing extensions: for everyone, as the article says:
> and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.
And there can only be very few browsers because of all the features they have to bit-perfectly support. Even Microsoft gave up and ceded their power to Google - Windows comes with repackaged Chrome.
Back when a web browser meant parsing tags and deciding where to place floating images, you could reasonably write your own. Now there's just too much of it. Even without JavaScript.