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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Web browsers really are the new operating systems.

Chrome OS was far ahead of its time, both in its general user hostility and in its excessive resource consumption for seemingly mundane tasks. Like when your roommate's YouTube streaming makes your Excel-like app horribly slow, because your new spreadsheet app needs high-speed internet for no obvious reason.

BTW, WebRTC and WebAssembly were great for crypto mining trojans embedded into ads. Before, they had to port their crypto miner to JavaScript by hand. By now, you can just cross-compile it. The progress of technology ... helps only the technology, but not you, the disposable user in front of the screen :p

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> Before, they had to port their crypto miner to JavaScript by hand

No, cross-compilers to JS are and were thing too, and were used by cryptominers.

Yes, but before webrtc they were easy to block.

What do cryptominers need WebRTC for?

To connect to arbitrary IPs and ports to send home the results of the calculations.

Which can be done with HTTP as well.

Yes, but that is A LOT easier to filter and detect, because then it'll be using the XHR API and HTTP protocol, whereas WebRTC allows free-form protocols.

You can't cross compile anything other than crypto miners or how does it not help anything else?

Most of the other uses are pointless.

I don't need WebRTC for chat, because IRC is still working just fine.

I don't need WebRTC for video calls, because Skype is still working just fine.

I don't need WebRTC and WebAssembly for online gaming, because I have Steam to install games locally. Plus latency and performance of games emscripten-ed to wasm tends to be atrocious.

So the only uses where I have seen the new Web* APIs in my life was obnoxious ads and newspaper websites trying to shove recommendations and notifications into my face.

What would you want to cross-compile that couldn't be done much better by building a proper local app?

Plenty of downvotes, but no productive suggestion of what use-case would be best served with WebRTC ...

WebRTC enables many of these things on the browser. That is the point. So your "I don't need WebRTC because I use native apps" is basically just "I don't need the internet because I can go next door to talk to my neighbors".

Just because something doesn't have value for you does not suggest it does not have value, period.

Almost. I'd say my argument is "I don't care about an online egg retailer shipping from China, because using the local supermarket is better in every way."

And obviously, Skype and IRC use the internet, too. So what is the benefit to me - the user - of "Skype inside web browser" over "Skype separate of web browser"?

I understand that WebRTC makes "Skype inside web browser" possible, but it also makes a lot of less desirable behavior possible. So there is be a trade-off between the advantages and the risks from adding WebRTC.

Which benefit does WebRTC generate for the user? I.e. why is it a good thing that web browsers added this?

That's just a matter of browser software. The Web platform should not suffer just because the browser is imperfect. You can write your perfect browser, fairly easily with the libraries available. I will try when I have some time.

Strictly speaking, it is more like the shell of the distributed operating system.

Which is also funny because, if I remember correctly, IE was deeply integrated into Windows Explorer and the desktop was essentially rendered by the browser. I remember being able to even change my wallpaper to a custom HTML page in Windows

Hey, refID af64e30y, get back to looking at ads while your browser mines cryptocoins! We'll be watching!

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