alt Hacker NewsThe Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford
Comments
I 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.
Crazy to say when desktop apps and TUIs are becoming more useful than ever. No the web is not enough, even for something as simple as version control.
We're probably further away now from "web is enough" than we were 5 years ago.
> the multiplayer-over-audio thing is a first for an RTS as far as I can tell
Because it's fun, but that's all it is. I had a class at university decades ago where the goal was to transmit data between two computers over audio (and the sound was unpleasant). It's not a novel idea, it's just not something that should be done other than for learning or fun.
I run roughly six applications regularly:
- One browser window (with tabs)
- One terminal window (with tabs)
- Signal (not a web app, for good reason, though frankly I'd be thrilled if it lived in a browser tab anyway as an app being served to localhost)
- The occasional PDF viewer for PDFs I'm working on (anything loaded from the web gets viewed in the in-browser PDF viewer, but when I'm creating presentations or papers or similar, I have a terminal and a PDF viewer both half-maximized)
- Video player for local videos (mpv)
- Music player for local music (quodlibet)
It does seem that more and more browser features have become stable but that has been sort of drowned out by the AI boom. Even with millions of us monkeys on these keyboards, (now monkey simulators?), I still think there are even more discoveries to be found in web dev. You can get so much functionality with even the most basic hardware.
> for software people, being perpetually devalued is pretty novel
Hadn't really realized this is happening. Is it? Actually my experience right now is the exact opposite.
But unlike the year of the Linux desktop (any year now!), the promise of the Web as the app platform of the future seems to recede ever further into the distance.
25 years ago well over 95% of users would have been on windows, and there is no chance in hell you'll ever convince me that modern web development is as easy as Visual Basic was for whipping up UIs back in the day.
That AI is making it easier is happenstance, it makes generating UIs in anything easier.
WebGPU sucks compared to the desktop APIs. JavaScript and wasm suck compared to native code. Not being able to have threads for loading things like assets in the background sucks.
Yeah there's a ton of llm slop web games out there but anything serious is going to be a desktop application
The web is a pile of garbage fronted by horrible software in the form of terrible browsers that is under massive, unceasing attack from AI bots that will render the entirety of it unusable over time.
It will be shutoff. And i wont miss it.
I like this statement:
> The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.
It's wild how much easier it is to build things that harness web technology these days. I'm building features on top of three.js and offline storage and SSE and WebAudio and WebAssembly multiple times per week these days. I used to tinker with some of those maybe once or twice a year.