<story><title>When will web browsers be complete?</title><url>https://gist.github.com/lf94/ad72f1da36fbc965e4a1d4daeb1d6cb3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;This essay could&amp;#x27;ve been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been reading a whitepaper from ~1997 on Microsoft&amp;#x27;s Distributed COM (DCOM) last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn&amp;#x27;t stop thinking: this is microservices. And it was really more than that - at least on the surface, this was microservices + orchestration + autoscaling + serverless, as well as, via Internet Explorer, component-based UIs with graceful degradation. That paper seems like a window to an alternate reality in which everything that&amp;#x27;s currently hot in tech has been done 20 years ago, except programming language-agnostic, using saner (i.e. binary) protocols, offline-first, and with advanced security built in from the start. I don&amp;#x27;t know why this is not our &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; reality, but I finally understand why MS was in a dominant position back then, and why IE was a hot thing.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: for the curious, the mentioned whitepaper is: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.softwaretoolbox.com&amp;#x2F;dcom&amp;#x2F;DCOM%20Technical%20Overview.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.softwaretoolbox.com&amp;#x2F;dcom&amp;#x2F;DCOM%20Technical%20Over...&lt;/a&gt;.</text></item><item><author>madrox</author><text>When this essay started with &amp;quot;As someone who has used the Web since 2007&amp;quot; I immediately felt old, so thanks for that. As someone who has been using the Web since 1994 (and I feel like I was late to the game), I can assure the author their perspective has a lot of recency bias and this isn&amp;#x27;t something to worry about, in the general sense. Or worry about it, because it already happened a while ago. Take your pick.&lt;p&gt;Local operating systems, which this essay says is the gold standard of feature sets, are not standing still. If you think of how long it will take for browsers to reach current parity, go back that amount of time and see how far the OS has come.&lt;p&gt;But let&amp;#x27;s consider, for a moment, that browsers catch up. Let&amp;#x27;s just look at native development in general, since this has had access to all local OS features since before the web. Has that never changed? It&amp;#x27;s changing all the time. We&amp;#x27;re finding higher abstractions to work with. We&amp;#x27;re making it easier. I highly doubt Grid and Flexbox as they exist today will still be how web layout works in 20 years.&lt;p&gt;Google isn&amp;#x27;t even the first to scare the world. This essay could&amp;#x27;ve been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. Stop laughing. It held even more dominance than Chrome does today, and was closed source. Somehow we survived...which is good, because VRML sucked.&lt;p&gt;However, even with all that aside, people have been rolling their own browsers for years. People fork chromium today. The dark web exists. Maybe in 20 years lots of people will be streaming everything from a private cloud supercomputer vis-a-vis Stadia. The internet is no more homogeneous than all the people of the world. Everyone is finding new ways to access it all the time. This is why open standards are more important than browsers. It means anyone can build their own at any time based on the documentation and it can all read the same documents.&lt;p&gt;So I wouldn&amp;#x27;t worry about this coming to pass in quite the way you think. Though running your browser in a VM isn&amp;#x27;t the worst idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnIdiotOnTheNet</author><text>&amp;gt; That paper seems like a window to an alternate reality in which everything that&amp;#x27;s currently hot in tech has been done 20 years ago, except programming language-agnostic, using saner (i.e. binary) protocols, offline-first, and with advanced security built in from the start.&lt;p&gt;Honestly this happens all the time. Not only do we seem to reinvent the wheel but we almost invariably reinvent it worse. Take &amp;#x27;dark mode&amp;#x27; for instance. Everybody lauds that they can switch to a different theme that they feel is easier on their eyes, apparently oblivious to the fact that we could do that in Windows 95 with significantly greater and more granular control at the OS level. This industry is overrun with complexity fetishists who keep piling on more and more abstractions and calling it progress when they manage to catch up with the less-abstracted past.</text></comment>
<story><title>When will web browsers be complete?</title><url>https://gist.github.com/lf94/ad72f1da36fbc965e4a1d4daeb1d6cb3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;This essay could&amp;#x27;ve been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been reading a whitepaper from ~1997 on Microsoft&amp;#x27;s Distributed COM (DCOM) last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn&amp;#x27;t stop thinking: this is microservices. And it was really more than that - at least on the surface, this was microservices + orchestration + autoscaling + serverless, as well as, via Internet Explorer, component-based UIs with graceful degradation. That paper seems like a window to an alternate reality in which everything that&amp;#x27;s currently hot in tech has been done 20 years ago, except programming language-agnostic, using saner (i.e. binary) protocols, offline-first, and with advanced security built in from the start. I don&amp;#x27;t know why this is not our &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; reality, but I finally understand why MS was in a dominant position back then, and why IE was a hot thing.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: for the curious, the mentioned whitepaper is: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.softwaretoolbox.com&amp;#x2F;dcom&amp;#x2F;DCOM%20Technical%20Overview.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.softwaretoolbox.com&amp;#x2F;dcom&amp;#x2F;DCOM%20Technical%20Over...&lt;/a&gt;.</text></item><item><author>madrox</author><text>When this essay started with &amp;quot;As someone who has used the Web since 2007&amp;quot; I immediately felt old, so thanks for that. As someone who has been using the Web since 1994 (and I feel like I was late to the game), I can assure the author their perspective has a lot of recency bias and this isn&amp;#x27;t something to worry about, in the general sense. Or worry about it, because it already happened a while ago. Take your pick.&lt;p&gt;Local operating systems, which this essay says is the gold standard of feature sets, are not standing still. If you think of how long it will take for browsers to reach current parity, go back that amount of time and see how far the OS has come.&lt;p&gt;But let&amp;#x27;s consider, for a moment, that browsers catch up. Let&amp;#x27;s just look at native development in general, since this has had access to all local OS features since before the web. Has that never changed? It&amp;#x27;s changing all the time. We&amp;#x27;re finding higher abstractions to work with. We&amp;#x27;re making it easier. I highly doubt Grid and Flexbox as they exist today will still be how web layout works in 20 years.&lt;p&gt;Google isn&amp;#x27;t even the first to scare the world. This essay could&amp;#x27;ve been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. Stop laughing. It held even more dominance than Chrome does today, and was closed source. Somehow we survived...which is good, because VRML sucked.&lt;p&gt;However, even with all that aside, people have been rolling their own browsers for years. People fork chromium today. The dark web exists. Maybe in 20 years lots of people will be streaming everything from a private cloud supercomputer vis-a-vis Stadia. The internet is no more homogeneous than all the people of the world. Everyone is finding new ways to access it all the time. This is why open standards are more important than browsers. It means anyone can build their own at any time based on the documentation and it can all read the same documents.&lt;p&gt;So I wouldn&amp;#x27;t worry about this coming to pass in quite the way you think. Though running your browser in a VM isn&amp;#x27;t the worst idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>projektfu</author><text>The thing holding DCOM back was that the protocol was closed source and unspecified. It’s very difficult to make Microsoft’s version of DCE RPC work with other implementations let alone their proprietary object extensions.&lt;p&gt;If they had wanted interoperability, they could have implemented something more standards based as IBM did with SOM.  But requiring Windows for all parts of distributed systems is very limiting.</text></comment>