> Because after seeing WebUSB and WebGPU I think my personal limit has been reached.
Sure, but where do you draw the line really? For me, having WebUSB and WebMIDI for example is useful, I want to be able to interact with synths over MIDI in the browser, or be able to access other accessories. I also love the idea of GPU access, so my personal limit has not been reached.
Multiply this by every vendor, developer and user of every browser who contributes to the specifications, and you end up with probably 1000 different directions everyone wants to move in. How do you decide which is the right direction?
Right now, the choice you have is which browser you use. If you don't want WebUSB or WebGPU or anything else "new and fancy", choose a browser that doesn't implement those things.
Browsers are just “standardised” OS at this point. Really, what is the difference? It seems to me that people basically wants a 1 to 1 mapping between every OS feature to browsers. I wouldn’t be surprised if this standard will fall apart in the next decade once Chrome runs everything. That is to say Chrome is the standard. I am already seeing websites drop support for Firefox and won’t even load using it.
The difference is that it is not a "standardized" OS interface. Rather it's a complex layer on top of operating systems offering dumbed down and less performant versions of what is available all of which is interfaced by a dynamic and not so performant language.
If it was something like a modern POSIX I don't think you'd have much complaining. But it's a lot heavier than that.
In the context of this thread it is enough to compare Web 3D capabilities and tooling, and how lacking they are when compared against with the native conterparts.
I'm not sure if these are examples of dropped support, but I run into issues on websites that prevent me from doing something I really need to do:
- I could not unsubscribe from amazon prime yesterday using firefox. The page where you select the option was not rendering correctly. It was white for half the page vertically and the link/button I need to press was absent.
- about 6 months ago I could not sign into apple id on apples site on firefox. (or something like this, I forget exactly what I was trying to do).
- about 6 months ago I could not sign into nintendo's site to cancel a subscription.
So it's not super frequent, but every few months there are important things I can't do in firefox.
In my experience, problems like that are almost always a matter of cookie/cache sticking around when it shouldn't or plugin interference. The only sites I ever have have blocking trouble with in FF are shitty web interfaces for local device configuration, old automatically generated webpages like from MS Access or some other super old enterprise abomination. I worked on a team of web developers that generally developed using FF and then tested heavily in chrome-- everything from simple pages augmented with JS to complex SPAs-- and the differences were pretty minimal.
Yeah that could possibly be it. If I run into again I could try clearing caches. And also wanted to mention that since firefox is what I use daily, of course I will mainly see issues there.
If I used chrome daily perhaps I would see the opposite (broken on chrome, works on firefox).
I get the same feel from DuckDuckGo. I use it, till it doesn't work, then switch to google when it doesn't. Of course google would perform better, as I only use it for the cases where DDG fails.
Yeah, with one exception it has always been dark reader that caused a page to render wrong in Firefox. The exception was some misconfigured oauth stuff that didn't work.
It's sad that there are specific browser-oriented websites (and development processes, obviously) instead of the standards-oriented ones.
(Sure, it's Chrome-oriented ones. We've seen similar previously with IE, by the way.)
We have standards for the web. Real ones: the docs, which are discussed and approved in the industry. We have them for a long time!
So if some browser does not comply to the standards, it's really not the best strategy to adapt a site to the browser instead of the standards.
We are in the situation when (effectively) one company (Google/Alphabet) can lead anything to the whole market, step by step (even when changes contradict the web standards that are in place). The market is not the browsers market, of coyrse, but the internet ads through browsers control, which brings the most money to Google. By projecting its power to each and any aspect of it, Google ensures the uninterrupted market control for years ahead. So Google will continue to do. In the long run, we need to rely on standards instead of specific browsers. Otherwise it's just the monopoly of Google and web tech "market" is just their own backyard. That will bite us all hard.
Having a standard is not even possible technically when you have 1 player that is too good. Due to Hyrum’s Law, any small divergence from the spec will be observed and relied on. Why would you work against the spec which is nebulous, when you could be testing against 99% of what your user use?
It's not too good. It's just wealthiest. Because it holds ads market monopoly. Because it happens to be the popular search engine at the same time.
But it's not the best. Firefox is on par (I know they get some (most?) payments from Alphabet). And people were using Firefox/Netscape browser long before Google existed.
Even if Chrome were the standard, there would still be variety due to plugins. A lot of sites have glitches in Chrome too, if you install the wrong plugins or turn stuff like third-party cookies off.
I'm not sure I trust people who say something doesn't work in Firefox, unless they tried it in a fresh profile with default settings.
I wonder if you could just duct tape a kernel to a modern browser and boot right into it. Ok, well, I know you can do that, but I wonder if you could get people to use it.
You'd need some tinkering to open a new browser window per monitor, couple of routes on 127.0.0.1 for config.
I want to be able to interact with synths over MIDI in the browser
Help me understand why this is. Is it because there aren't native programs for the platform you're using? Is it to allow plug-ins or other abilities that wouldn't otherwise be available? Is it so that you can sync up with other musicians and play together in a way that wouldn't be possible without a browser?
choose a browser that doesn't implement those things.
The way feature creep have been going lately, in about six months that will mean Lynx.
Because it's really cool to try out experimental instruments other poeple have made by simply opening a webpage, without having to execute untrusted native code that could have bad consequences.
I'm interested if this is true. It seems like the js sandbox is pretty well implemented now in most cases. Webgl had some problems at first leaking host data, but the willingness to sacrifice performance for security seems pretty ingrained in these consortiums?
You oversaw the untrusted part, this is the only reason I prefer web over native really. If there was a way to run native apps with that level of isolation, I would prefer native.
Unfortunately, none of those are cross-platform... Closest we get to something similar to the web is either the JVM or APE (Actually Portable Executable) but then those are generally not as isolated as the alternatives you mentioned, sadly.
> Help me understand why this is. Is it because there aren't native programs for the platform you're using?
Easier to create, easier to share and run. Mainly easier to create because the ones I'm sharing small MIDI sequencer experiments with are also web developers, so we just send each other links where we can run stuff direction from, and we can help each other out as we all use the same technology. Really easy to understand what the other is doing too, as you just open up the source of the page and that's it.
I've played around with other languages/runtimes for doing the same thing, but nothing is as fast to implement as with JavaScript, probably mostly due to familiarity.
I'm not going to argue against these features, but I find that last argument you raise to be a rather dull and useless one. Yeah, I'll just go ahead and pick from one of the hundreds of competing implementations to find one that doesn't. Oh, wait, they don't exist.
It's like saying "if you don't like the laws(/taxes/whatever) where you live, go somewhere else" and acting as if I can just hop on over to Mars. I can't.
That is exactly what they are saying. Having control over your relative experience is the only thing people want.
As we all spend most of our time inside of browser interfaces its not a surprise we see app, features and interfaces move to that process portal to. (Online IDEs, Cloud, Photo editing, etc.) Sure you can use your solution but in general, as always, its whats most efficient for the masses.
Sure, but where do you draw the line really? For me, having WebUSB and WebMIDI for example is useful, I want to be able to interact with synths over MIDI in the browser, or be able to access other accessories. I also love the idea of GPU access, so my personal limit has not been reached.
Multiply this by every vendor, developer and user of every browser who contributes to the specifications, and you end up with probably 1000 different directions everyone wants to move in. How do you decide which is the right direction?
Right now, the choice you have is which browser you use. If you don't want WebUSB or WebGPU or anything else "new and fancy", choose a browser that doesn't implement those things.