Modern browsers are shit
In my last post I explained to you that Google Chrome ruined the modern internet for all of us by being too capable.By that I do not mean that Google Chrome is well made. In fact I think the opposite. I think it is shit. And I'm going to tell you why.
But why stop there? I'll explain why -all- modern browsers are shit. Google Chrome is just one of them.
Wheel made of wheels
We had efficient UI systems with native apps. Then we made the internet and it was ugly.
People wanted the internet to be as pretty and as usuable as native apps. So we did that. Now we have effectively rebuilt the entirety of UI and UX into a sandboxed system. A virtual machine essentially.
But... why? Couldn't we just continue making more and better apps and have them work with the internet? We could have, but then we wouldn't have the glorious recrusive shitpile of wheels we now have.
Ephemerality
You want to be able to get that information you see online right now later sometime? LULZ. That's not how it works sucker.
Browsers could have been designed to persist data easily. They weren't and aren't.
Look but don't touch
You think just because you see it online you are permitted to do -anything- else with it besides look at it this moment? Nope. Also wrong. Content being online grants you zero rights or license. It's just sort of there.
Licesning information could have been placed into the standard. But it wasn't and won't be. Best of luck determining what is legal. You'll need it. And a good lawyer.
Remember when you could download your -whatever-
For the most part you can't download your emails, movies, music, whatever any more. Why? Because browsers are awesome and why would you need to download anything. Just use the stuff through a browser with a service paid for by the month.
Browsers could use semantic content and ensure that everything you view must also be able to be able to be downloaded. That would tie into licensing annotations.
But, well, nah. The powers that be don't want that. So all modern browsers don't do that.
I spy. You spy. We all spy
Whatever you do online? Is known to the man. Known to the advertisers. Known to data brokers. Known to whoever buys the data next. Probably known to some scumbag crook.
Known to you? Nah.
The tracking isn't for your benefit. It's for them.
Try using a privacy focused browser sometime. It breaks a significant portion of the internet. The "good browsers that work well" aren't the ones focusing on privacy.
You have spare CPU right? Right?
Browsers could have been designed from day one of having multiple tabs to halt scripting in anything but the current active tab. They... don't.
In fact, there isn't a single major browser that can. If you leave lots of tabs open I hope you enjoy paying for burning watts pointlessly.
Consistent UI and UX? Nah
They could have kept improving the set of UI/UX elements over the years. But they didn't. Instead everyone and their brother and their 5 year old nephew just makes their own horrible new UI/UX elements via scripting and hacky CSS.
You see, we don't just have a wheel made of wheels. We have a wheel made of wheels made of used chewing gum and broken kindergarten toys and whatever someone could dig up at the local dump.
You wanted native apps? Nah
It wasn't enough for the house of cards made of matches and twigs to just infect the internet and browsers. Oh no. They decided to do away with native apps entirely and just build those from the same shitpile.
Electron, PWAs, and omfg whatever AI nightmare they shove down our throats next.
Free information? LULZ
You thought the internet was a place for free sharing of information and collaboration between all of mankind right?
Wrong.
It's for walled gardens and services where if you trip over the tiny unmarked landmine all your content and access gets revoked with no way to appeal or resolve the situation besides crying.
Remember my blabbering above about ensuring downloads and license metadata is part of the standard and design of the entire system? That wouldn't alone have prevented this but it would have greatly lessened the occurrence of it that we have currently.
I control what I publish?
You'd think that but also no.
Once it is out there on the internet it will just continue on its merry way whether you like it or not, because the standard, the browsers, the whole system was never designed to track ownership or permissions on that data in any way.
If you want to participate in society, the systems you are sending the stuff you write to effectively own it and do whatever they want with it, including refusing to let you get rid of it when it begins to harm you.
I'll give you a personal example. Google my name. Among the things there? Slander against me implying I was engaged in illegal behavior. I was investigated yes. I was cleared. Can I removed the articles and speculation about me before I was cleared? No. I've tried. It's impossible.
That happens because nobody ever bothered to consider the disastrous harm that not protecting information about ourselves can become and currently is.
I said it first
Only you can't prove that at all. Nothing about the way browsers or the internet was designed enables proving that you said something online before others.
Another personal example.
I was the first person on planet to both figure out how to get on top of the castle in Mario 64 without any stars in the game AND to publicly explain how on the public Nintendo forums.
The forums went bye bye fast. Nobody archived them.
Nintendo Power Issue 100 was published much later. Describes my exact method. Does not credit me.
Free services
That delete your data whenever they see fit.
Another story time. I used Google Picasa once upon a time for 500+ of my personal photos. Nicely organized.
Eventually Google shuttered Picasa. Because that is what Google does. They migrated my pictures to "Google Photos". I shrugged.
A bit later all of my photos vanished. No warning email. No nothing. No recourse. Just gone.
This could have been prevented my intelligent internet design where hosting companies have to comply by some sort of rules such as giving you notice before fucking deleting stuff that is valuable to you.
But nope. Nobody building the almighty internet cared really about not losing data. The only considerations have been "more capable! faster!"
Update or get fucked
Remember when you could buy a computer and continue using it and the software that functioned with it in perpetuity until it physically broke?
Those days are long gone.
Now you have to update constantly. And when you update? Your old software will cease to function.
And oh, by the way, they don't sell that software for a one time fee any more. You need to buy the month to month service.
What does this have to do with browsers? Because in-browser software in the form of web apps are the ultimate incarnation of this. Software you can't own in perpetuity at all. Once it is gone it isn't even just gone for you but for everyone.
It's the worst form of software to ever exist in that sense.
Summary
I'm getting tired. You get the idea hopefully. With browsers it is a swamp of layered garbage with no real cohesive sense, and it's all ephemeral and more costly than what we had before.
Give me my boxed software that I pay for once and get the fuck off my lawn.