this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
1334 points (99.9% liked)
Technology
60081 readers
3182 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Firefox in the meanwhile but long term we need to move away from the unfathomably bloated web ~~protocol~~ standard/browsers.
Web protocol? Which one?
I wouldn’t consider http or dns bloated, for instance. And tcp/ip isn’t web-specific enough for me to think that’s what you mean by “the web protocol”.
Are you just trying to say you don’t like websites in a way that sounds techy?
I'm referring to the totality of what is required to make a complete and secure web browser from scratch.
That’s a rant about the complexity of modern browser engines, not the protocols. The web worked just fine before CSS and JS. The protocols aren’t the problem. Lynx is still being maintained if you want the web without the bloat of features like js and inline images.
I believe the rant demonstrates there cannot be more competition for browsers and therefore justifies the idea that browsers will stagnate and come to an end. I think the solution will be to move away from one application doing many things to using separate software dedicated to narrow purposes.
Ah yes, I do the same in my kitchen. One machine that does one job and then sits around unused for the rest of the year.
No, obviously that is not the way. I don't want to deal with 20 separate programs to do the job Firefox does.
When you want to use the scanner but can't because the printer is broken.
What’s the “web protocol”? Are you talking about HTTP?
Seems from their response to me asking the same thing, they mean browser engines, not anything to do with any of the protocols involved.
I wish I'd said "web standards" instead.
You mean HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc?
Including those but also all specifications defined by the W3C. I would post other examples here but I'm out of my depth.
Ok well, the modern web technology ecosystem is incredibly featureful and flexible, it allows a huge array of options for building rich interactive applications, all delivered to your browser on-demand in a few seconds.
Sure some of the technologies involved aren’t perfect (and I challenge you to find any system that feature-rich that doesn’t have a few dark corners), but there really no alternative option that comes close in terms of flexibility and maturity.
Adding features endlessly, heedless of danger of the inate security issue from the complexity, makes for an uncompetative and ultimatly unsustainable ecosystem.
The alternative I believe in is to use seperare apps for each segmented feature (the dedicated video player plays the video, the browser merely fetches it).
Web standards are public, discussed openly, heavily scrutinised (including by security researchers) and available for any browser developer to implement.
You want to go back to the days of Realplayer, Acrobat Reader, Flash, etc, when individual companies made their own privately developed closed source apps?