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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

The web sucks because why would I possibly want random people to write code to execute on my machine when I just want to view content?

The web is chock full of shit JavaScript; most of which is not adding value for me (ad placement, etc) and some of which is at odds with my interests (trackers, etc).

We have every single web site wanting to give me some sort of unique experience when all I want is to navigate to the information I want and maybe buy something.

I think that the web is insane. I want the web to deliver content and I want my client to present it to me in a way I control. Instead, every server wants to control my browser so they can control my experience and extract data from me.

It messed up.

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Twitter, followed closely by YouTube, is the epitome of this disease. Displaying short paragraphs of text with images and video is something web browsers have been perfectly capable of doing for decades (perhaps a little later with the video, but still more than a decade ago), and so is posting such short pieces of text and uploading files containing images and video.

Yet these days, to do that somehow requires a disturbingly slow-loading and resource-consuming JS "webapp" that complains if you're not using one of the very few "supported" browsers or even just a slightly older version thereof, refuses to work with a "sorry, an error occurred" message frequently, and has a UI that looks like it was made for illiterate 5-year-olds? The average web forum works fine with absolutely NO JS, yet has a UI with a superior set of functionality and richness.

Surprisingly, Twitter and YouTube used to be far more user-friendly and less resource-consuming than they are today. Then... I'm not sure what happened. I guess it could be called "the modern web".

The sad part is that Twitter wasn't always like that. I remember old versions of Twitter being pretty snappy.

Facebook too... the latest redesign is an abomination, and as much as I like having a dark mode, the new UI is so slow and so laggy that it makes me not want to use Facebook anymore. But I've been using Facebook since 2005 when it was just a LAMP system that served server-rendered HTML, and it was amazing. I remember my peers talking about how Facebook was so much better than MySpace because it was so clean and snappy.

  > The web sucks [...]

As much as I love and miss native interfaces -- old Win3.1 games that used actual windows for the UI, or newsgroup readers, or for that matter native email clients -- I gotta say, the web as an app platform means I can migrate off one platform and onto another and know my basic needs are met.

The web as an app-delivery platform is amazing. I don't miss documents that only open in WordPerfect 5.1, or having to UUCP files around, or being forced to write non-platform-specific software once for Windows, once for Mac, maybe once for Unix, and hell with anything else.

To the point of TFA, the desktop as a concept is well past its expiration date. Apple ships amazing phones and tablets that are touch-based, and is migrating their touch-based UX to MacOS, but for some damn reason refuses to ship touchscreens, which is just bonkers. We're halfway between paradigms right now, so it's rough going sometimes, but I'm hopeful we'll get somewhere great.

> migrating their touch-based UX to MacOS, but for some damn reason refuses to ship touchscreens, which is just bonkers

Touch based computing doesn't scale to larger devices very well.

It works well on phones since our fingers are just doing small movements, but on larger devices, users get "gorilla arms" when using large touch screen devices while having to hold their arms in the air.

Gorilla arms are definitely a thing, and purely touch-based UIs on the vertical monitors we have now don't work very well and will never become popular.

However, I had a touchscreen XPS 13 a while back. And being able to tap the occasional button or slider was _super_ helpful. Certainly more helpful and less jarring than the touch bar my Macbook has.

And consider things like the Microsoft Surface Studio, a desktop PC with a touch display designed to angle at a position that would be more usable with a pen or touch controls for longer periods of time.

We're getting there.

I think open standards address your issue just as effectively. You mentioned newsgroup readers and mail user agents, for example.

The web apps that I enjoy using are the ones that enable real-time collaboration. I think that's where the web app wins out over native. But the vast majority of things we do online are nothing to do with that.

I reckon I skip 80% of the links I engage with here because I'm immediately presented with a GDPR dialogue, or because the website won't load because it relies on some external domain that I've blocked.

As for iOS and macOS, I really don't think they're serious productivity platforms. I've migrated everything that matters to me to Linux, and when my iPhone finally dies, I'll move over to a Linux phone as well.

>The web sucks because why would I possibly want random people to write code to execute on my machine when I just want to view content?

Your OS sucks, because it doesn't make it safe for you to do so. The freedom to just run something without worry about side-effects is what we used to have back in the days of two floppy disk MS-DOS machines, and it was amazing. Your OS was safe because of the backups, and the write protect tab. Your data disk was all you risked, and you had copies of that as well. Your side effects were well known and contained.

We need to reclaim our general purpose computers. Capability Based Operating systems are how we do it.

>Your OS was safe because of the backups, and the write protect tab. Your data disk was all you risked, and you had copies of that as well. Your side effects were well known and contained.

What about an attacker reading secrets off your system? How does the OS protect that especially with Spectre around.

Spectre is based on a timing attack.

If you don't give your task access to the clock, it can't run a timing attack.

If you don't give your task access to the internet, it can't exfiltrate any data it did get.

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