The Web Is More Than Enough

would be fun to revisit and see what v2 would look like today, I have a feeling I wouldn't be manually recording voice lines this time around ha

https://github.com/pathouse/kitchen_assistant

Ask your LLM, "Can we remove three.js so that we can re-architect the graphics system to be more optimized for our specific use case?" and see what it comes back with.

You mean the LLM is?

Back when a web browser meant parsing tags and deciding where to place floating images, you could reasonably write your own. Now there's just too much of it. Even without JavaScript.

https://ladybird.org/

Native apps have their place, but the average everyday user is becoming more and more hostile to the idea of installing an application and just using their existing web browser to accomplish the same task. I know I would rather use my limited SSD space for photos, games, and movies, than 100 different apps. Also supporting hundreds of different pieces of hardware isn't economical for most projects. The web solves both problems in that it gets your app into the hands of users immediately and you can delegate the responsibility of supporting various hardware to the browser vendors.

Google also doesn't own the web contrary to popular belief (Even if they have an outsized amount of influence). The web is an open standard, anyone could hack together their own browser if they wanted to with enough time and effort. That amount prior to the AI era was so large, only a shop like Google, Firefox, or Apple could put in the time and effort required to make one, and the amount of time of effort that requires is falling significantly day-by-day due to LLM generated code.

i find it ridiculously uncompelling. it's always felt not like a well formed grounded way to be. it's amazing that we have really good capable platforms that can help us. especially when there are multi-polar orgs like w3c and what and lately wicg that serve as stewarts, that watch over these platforms. when there are often ietf tie ins. when there are projects like interop that help move the platform forward across browsers, agree on the baseline.

what's so viciously deeply libertarian coded to me about this assessment is it's me me me me me. what can i do? what can i make? what software can i build? with some notes of fear to tell you google is bad. beware google. i realize the anti-google sentiment is super strong in the world, but after being around the web for decades i can hardly say what thanks and joy and celebration i have to google for building the ultimate existential hedge against everyone else: a free platform for the free world that runs free on endless devices, that is the only free platform the world has ever seen with any success. that has gotten vastly better.

i think at this point and for half a decade plus on HN the "I know it tends to be an unpopular opinion" is thanks for the web and google. i think i'm in the minority for my thanks. i think the outrage and dismisal and scare words is by far the most popular stance.

but what's on the other hand? native apps, on native platforms? those things that run on 20% of computers, that you have to be a licensed paid up authorized developer to ship to, that have very long queues for submitting your app to to maybe some day have it approved perhaps?

the libertarian view is what you can do. yeah, the super small, the do it yourself. it's a fantasy.

the mature societal view is what we can do. it's having this permissionless platform that anyone can build software for. it's having Project Fugu trying to make that platform competitive, good, capable: giving hte native platform a constant run for the money. so that we all can benefit. so that any dev can make an app. it's "extensible web manifesto", where the web doesn't bake in particular flavors of software development, so we can choose jquery or backbone or react or vue or solid or svelte or lit, so society can iterate and keep refining and re-deciding what surface they want to program to, what models fit them, what they want to program against: you don't see that with native platforms! you get what they are and that's mostly that!

you get such a wide ranging low level platform, such freedom to use it as you please on the web. but much much much more, everyone else can enjoy it too. it's a civilized platform, the only civilized one where we have control, where we the world has say. if you don't like the native platforms, well, you can remake something else, but it'll be you and your couple friends perhaps amid the 7b people who are still using either the web or what big companies gave them.

the libertarian sees what they can do. but i'm really interested in what we can do. and there's nothing like the web for this. as developers, as users, as users in-between user-scripting or writing extensions: for everyone, as the article says:

> and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.

I think I might want to move that forward a tiny bit...to maybe 2000 ~ 2005; but no further...but i get your point, and you're NOT wrong!

> Most of the problems we have with online security, privacy, tracking, etc., are the result of the rapid, irresponsible and sometimes infantile expansion of capabilities of the simple web browser.

While I am so impressed by some functions that modern web browsers can do, and how creative some people can get...I'm with you!

> Canvas? Resolutions? Sound drivers? web-usb ?!

Like 20% of the cool - and i'll add advanced - functions that modern browsers can achieve is really impressive! But, i think they *should* only be used for like 20% (or the minority) use cases...Whereas the rest of 80% functionality should be as basic as hell! A browser started as a document viewer, and we've strayed soooo far from that! And worse, since everybody wants to put apps into the browser, now browsers have to become the "operating system" for everything. If things ran smooth and simple, and every web page was not full of 500MB worth of crap, then maybe a browser as an operating system for most functions might be ok...but, nope. That's not the reality we live in. People keep jamming in all sorts of functions into the browser - because they can - so, things will continue to deteriorate. We can fight to backtrack this reality, or create an alternative (perhaps retro sort of) reality - e.g. Gemini capsules, neuvo BBS, etc., or we can opt out and go offline as much as possible. Lately, I've been dabbling tons more in the latter 2, and I feel much happier.

You just placed controls at absolute coordinates and they worked. When you ran the program it always looked exactly the same as in the editor. Later Windowses could scale it up by a constant factor for high-DPI displays.

In hindsight it's an excellent use of the KISS principle. We didn't need layout managers. Yes the window couldn't be maximised, but so be it, this was fine for many windows. If you did want that then you had to recalculate the widget positions yourself.

Exemplary of this style, I think, is the Windows 95-98 display settings window. The one every kid discovered because it was quickly accessible by right clicking the desktop and selecting "properties".

The other side of that coin is training. You can train people on VB in far less time. Most people writing JavaScript for a living have absolutely no idea what they are doing. Most of these people are completely reliable on React to put text on screen and then other languages at absolutely every opportunity. While there is amazing stuff coming out of a select few start ups and many open source projects, those people are not the typical corporate software developer.

Several rounds of layoffs in BigTech recently - for example, Microsoft is currently giving "Voluntary Exit Offers" to 60,000+ folks.

That and a general air that management is starting to think that LLMs can do the jobs of expensive engineers...

The only personal app I use that is native is a game.

So my experience is that web is serious and native is frivolous.

It's sad we got such intensification of react as a jQuery++, such massive focus on munging html. But we really have made few gains building actual full stack front end architectures, about understanding deeply how to get work off the main thread, how to run js well. And there so much platform there we could be using!

Hurts a lot that workers have had absolutely pitiful ESM support. Still no import maps, and I'd place very high odds this baked nonsense stays just as shitfest when 2030 rolls around. That massively inhibits doing the right thing, makes it massively shittier to use the platform, alas. But it's doable. Bundle bundle bundle. Blah.