alt Hacker News> Adding scripting capabilities was a mistake, so we can avoid it now.
> Instead, you can provide a Geo link to open the location in any client that supports the protocol.
Sorry but as someone old enough to remember when the web was mostly non interactive I vastly prefer the current situation despite its many shortcomings. I want to keep a minimal number of softwares on my computer. I don't want to give a hundred "clients" access to my computer when I can just run JavaScript sandboxed in my browser. If someone sends me a link and tells me it's a cool game he found online I will open it in my browser and have a look but I will not just run random binaries on my computer. Oh, and I like being able to access any website just from my browser on my Linux, instead of hoping that there is a Linux client that isn't 5 years out of date or fiddling with wine to figure out why the windows binary wouldn't run.
I understand why people dislike the web sandbox or having to run a full blown VM for everything, but please understand that this is also what makes the web great. You can run everything and fear nothing.
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I completely agree. The situation before the "Web Platform" was the "Windows Platform" where you had to give money to Microsoft to use a computer because few developers wanted to make cross-platform software, and almost nobody wanted to make good cross-platform software. As Mac user it was miserable.
You've misunderstood. The blog post is not talking about running random binaries. It's talking about opening links and files using different programmes, like PDF viewers, video players, etc. There's a video of a talk that the developer gave, which I can't find the link to at the moment, where he demonstrates running a map programme (already installed on the machine, not just fetched from a random website) to open a link with lat/lon coordinates with an interactive map.
In general, Dillo follows the Unix philosophy. You use separate programmes to handle things that Dillo can't itself, like watching videos.