this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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The answer to questions like this is often that there was no need for such safety features when the underlying technology was introduced (more examples here) and adding it later required consensus from many people and organizations who wouldn't accept something that broke their already-running systems. It's easy to criticize something when you don't understand the needs and constraints that led to it.
(The good news is that gradual changes, over the course of years, can further improve things without being too disruptive to survive.)
He's not wrong in principle, though: Building safe web sites is far more complicated than it should be, and relies far too much on a site to behave in the user's best interests. Especially when client-side scripts are used.
And that assumption is exactly what led us to the current situation.
It doesn't matter, why the present is garbage, it's garbage and we should address that. Statements like this are the engineering equivalent of "it is what it is shrug emoji".
Take a step back and look at the pile of overengineered yet underthought, inefficient, insecure and complicated crap that we call the modern web. And it's not only the browser, but also the backend stack.
Think about how many indirections and half-baked abstraction layers are between your code and what actually gets executed.
Think about that, and then...what, exactly? As a website author, you don't control the browser. You don't control the web standards.
I'm extremely sympathetic to this way of thinking, because I completely agree. The web is crap, and we shouldn't be complacent about that. But if you are actually in the position of building or maintaining a website (or any other piece of software), then you need to build on what already exists, unless you're in the exceedingly rare position of being able to near-unilaterally make changes to an existing platform (as Google does with Chrome, or Microsoft and Apple do with their OSes) or to throw out a huge amount of standard infrastructure and start as close to "scratch" as possible (e.g. GNU Hurd, Mill Computing, Oxide, Redox OS, etc; note that several of these are hobby projects not yet ready for "serious" use).