Browser vendors collaborating to mitigate a problem they created by shoving more and more complexity into web standards, resulting in a huge moat when it comes to implementing a browser engine.
This complexity moat is what gives Google control over things like Widevine to force you to watch ads, and Apple control over things like slowing down PWA adoption to force developers to use their app store.
Not saying this is evil, just companies following profit incentives as intended. But it often results in worse outcomes for users.
I would love to see some sort of reboot of the web with simple protocols and real experimentation happening in browsers again.
It is not the complexity of WWW that give you Widevine.
It is the need, or the greed, to monetise every view of your screen that give birth of Widevine. [0] This is because DRM is already applied to IPTV way before company start streaming video over the internet.
Also Widevine doesn't force you to watch ad. Last check Youtube is not doing server side ad insertion yet. meaning even if the main content is DRM protected, the AD is not part of the main content (and protected), and so it is technically possible to download the main content and stitch them back together without the ad.
I agree, but nevertheless Gemini is much better than WWW is many ways.
However, different people (including myself) have different ideas about what it should and shouldn't be.
My idea is that the WWW has way too much messy, bad stuff, complexity, etc; however, there are also some stuff that WWW does not have even though it might be good to do.
(Therefore I made up Scorpion protocol and file format, according to my own criticism of Gemini protocol. There is also Spartan, that someone else did, but I have some criticism of that, too (e.g. why is a user name and password allowed in the URL even though they are not used?).)
(Therefore I made up Scorpion protocol and file format, according to my own criticism of Gemini protocol. There is also Spartan, that someone else did, but I have some criticism of that, too (e.g. why is a user name and password allowed in the URL even though they are not used?).)
I would love to see some sort of reboot of the web with simple protocols and real experimentation happening in browsers again.
A lot of the web is still usable in text-based and simple HTML browsers. The problem is convincing brainwashed developers to NOT adopt the latest trendy features that invariably are only available in Big Browser (and sometimes Firefox.)
Right, they will never stop, there will never be a ceiling at which any browser vendor says "okay this is good, let's just stabilize at this point and refine what we have". There will always be the endless thirst for greater abstraction, deeper access to host hardware/peripherals and I/O, and really just more ways to turn the web into a profitable software-delivery mechanism.
What's wrong with that? It's not like it's ever going to go back to a "web document" only delivery mechanism, so might as well make it very very good at doing what it is already used for
> and Apple control over things like slowing down PWA adoption to force developers to use their app store.
Wait.
You say "browsers have too many complex APIs, and this is bad" and then also "This browser has not enough complex APIs, and this is bad". It sounds like you would agree with Safari if they're creating less complexity into (shipping) web standards?
I didn't say whether I think PWA APIs are too complex. I actually didn't call out any APIs specifically. Not that those aren't important conversations and related to what I'm trying to say.
> Not saying this is evil, just companies following profit incentives as intended.
Love of money is the root of all evil.
> But it often results in worse outcomes for users.
"The sad fact of the matter is that people play politics with standards to gain commercial advantage, and the result is that end users suffer the consequences. This is the case with character encoding for computer systems, and it is even more the case with HDTV." Well, they forgot to mention WWW, too.
> I would love to see some sort of reboot of the web with simple protocols and real experimentation happening in browsers again.
Some people have working on alternative protocols and file formats (and sometimes, variants of existing ones or reusing older ones), including myself.
The newest version of the specification document is also accessible by the Scorpion protocol itself (currently TLS is not implemented on the server side): scorpion://zzo38computer.org/specification.txt
(Some of the other things other people have done are: Gemini, Spartan, and some others. Some of them (e.g. HYDIN, TerseNet) are not defined enough at this time, so it would be difficult to use them.) There are also other existing protocols, e.g. NNTP and IRC for communication between users, and Gopher for files and menus with hypertext.)
Of course, different people have different ideas, and different goals and criticisms (I have some of my own criticisms too, but many other people have other criticisms of Gemini and these other protocols/file-formats, some of which may be found on Hacker News). You are free to make criticisms of Scorpion (including if any part of the document is unclear, or if you think some part is good or is not good), too.
Actually, the repository there also does include a few other things; the "astroget" program (similar than curl) implements Scorpion protocol and also implements Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, NNTP, and HTTP (deliberately not implementing cookies and many other features of HTTP; if you need those features then you can use curl instead, anyways).
This complexity moat is what gives Google control over things like Widevine to force you to watch ads, and Apple control over things like slowing down PWA adoption to force developers to use their app store.
Not saying this is evil, just companies following profit incentives as intended. But it often results in worse outcomes for users.
I would love to see some sort of reboot of the web with simple protocols and real experimentation happening in browsers again.