This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Eh, 80% of what this Dan fellow provides can't be all that much...
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.
That’s not how security development works. New things come up and need to be updated to protect you.
HA!
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.
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.
While true, some things we want to simplify are sometimes as simple as they can be.
But saying that, I'm thinking of Java, not of the Web. Java is really a wonderful creation.
Just - sometimes when learning new things I understand that yes, I was right and some thing is too complex and it's just that, but sometimes that it's optimal and the "simple" way is even more complex.
IMHO the Web solves two goals, which should be separated. Global hypertext services and serving applications executed on client in a sandbox. The latter is far more complex and demanding for security and efficiency and features, but the former is far more important socially.
Maybe the former should rely upon a simpler and easier technology, like Gemini, and the latter be a kind of applications like an address book or a 2FA application. Where you see a list of imported connections, press "run", and then over a standard protocol fetch the actual executable application to run in a sandbox. What the Web in practice already is for most people, untied from a global hypertext system. So that we'd have both.
I mean, it's pretty normal to open magnet links in a different application, or download an RDP connection file and open it in an RDP client.
OK, my brain is asleep.
CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess.
Why would less money make people do more work to fix this?
Their point is to make them dissapear, not fix.
Cutting out swaths of code and features - without breaking other code and features - is not a small task.
It's probably more time consuming and complex than just continuing to update at a slower pace.
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.
Of course developers wanted this. They wanted to push all the complexity into the browser so they didn't have to worry about it themselves. Google was happy to provide this because it meant that they could be the only ones that could write a browser. That was the "conspiracy" you're talking about - but it wasn't a conspiracy, it was more of a strategy on behalf of Google, who knew that they were the only ones that could provide this level of support, and so if they did it, nobody else would be able to compete with them. Even Microsoft gave up on their own engine.
But the only reason Google could do this is because they were deriving revenue from their advertising monopoly. If their web browser was honestly funded, many, many of the features that we see in Chrome today would have never existed.
Google was happy to provide this because it meant that they could be the only ones that could write a browser.
Word. That, and so many other things.
Also, I'm not going to argue that things aren't better for developers today than they were before. Sure, web development is much easier these days. But at the same time, I think web applications are way too overengineered. There are lots of things that could be done in simpler ways - for example, why is it necessary to restyle scrollbars, or reimplement standard components like drop-down menus with reimplementations written entirely in Javascript? Things like this are just stupid and having to drop support for trivial things like this in the name of making browsers simpler is well worth it in my opinion.
Dropping support for that stuff means breaking 95% of the websites people currently use. It's a non-starter, it cannot ever happen, even if you think it would be for the best.
I remember a lot of similar arguments about how ubiquitous Flash was when mobile devices were first taking off. Not saying it will be easy or even likely not saying it will never happen is a bit of an assumption.
It's a different situation, as a dev I'd happily bet my life on this assumption.
This is so wild. I really don't miss Flash, but since Steve killed it with the iPhone, Web development has spent more than 10 years to reinvent the ActionScript3 environment and make the entire web depend on it. And who solely prevented AS3 as a web standard from happening? Chris Wilson, Web Standards Tech Lead at Google, in his former role at browser monopolist Microsoft.
Today, every single piece of the web is designed by Google to further their business. And all these fucking Electron applications...
I really don’t miss Flash,
Standardized "Flash", well-sandboxed and separated from the browser itself as it was, would be a good idea though.
to reinvent the ActionScript3 environment and make the entire web depend on it.
Unfortunately the separation part they "solved".
I wasn't aware of that, but it's crazy. Thanks for sharing it. The sad truth is that there are probably lots of other standards that didn't make it into browsers either because Google refused to adopt them in Chrome (JPEG2000 for example, but that's a complicated ). Google had way too much influence over web standards because they had total control of the web browser.
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?
This is a result of Google most likely losing the anti-monopoly trial that's been underway for a while now, which in my book is a Good Thing.
Focusing on one aspect of it being not so good feels counterproductive to me.
Anyhow, let's see how this plays out first. First of all I want to see the upcoming separations/selling off of Google's tentacles actually happening, and actually resulting in significantly less monopoly for Google/Alphabet.
The skeptic in me says that it won't be quite as glorious as I hope, and funding will just flow differently. Who knows, maybe some other power hungry corp will step up.
OP:
maybe browser technology should be funded by government
Yes, but never directly!
maybe browser technology should be funded by governments
Yeah let's make it even easier for them to implement backdoors
I mean, before DOGE ostensibly took over USDS I was aware of it funding open source projects through normal processes just because their continued improvement helped the government function. Making software good for government agencies was one of their mandates.
If I had full faith in the current Mozilla project like I used to, I'd say they could just accept funding through the nonprofit in a similar setup and just do good things.
My point is there are ways to make it work where there is funding without influence. Just corruption and capitalism are fighting against it.
governments
Be careful what you ask for :(.
South Korea mandated internet explorer for all purchase checkout until relatively recently maybe the last 5 years. They had all these pieces built around it so checking out at a website you would have to prove your identity using national ID and then only IE would work.
Be very careful what you ask for.
This doesn't sound bad at all. This sounds like someone other than Google will be able to have a meaningful affect on web development.
unless, say, OpenAI, or Perplexity, or Microsoft buy it, and then cut Mozilla funding.
If only this could lead to scaling down the scope of web technologies so it’s sustainable to develop a browser without that 80% funding.
Wouldn’t be the first time we dropped an ultra complex technology for something much more simple, e.g. DCOM/CORBA for JSON-based RPC.
