Would you describe today's web browsers as “innovative?” | Hacker News Reader

Would you describe today's web browsers as “innovative?”

docs.google.com

No, and they shouldn't be. Modern web browsers are "streamlined", which is what they ought to be and how they best serve their users - by being a minimal window to access the real protagonist, web content.

"Innovative" ideas should be tested in the form of separate applications or plugins, not shoehorned into the core tool that people use for almost all their access to Internet; experimenting with innovative ideas in this minimal tool is likely to break some workflows for most people.

So the concern about "innovation" within the context of a browser is that can disrupt how they currently work. That being said, do you think that the separate plugins and applications out there are innovative?

Some of there are, some of them don't :-)

The good think is that there's a lot more of variety on apps and plugins than there are different viable mainstream browsers, and I can use those for specific functions at different times. Bundling everything within the same application would force me to have them in my interface all the time.

So the concern about "innovation" within the context of a browser is that can disrupt how they currently work.

That seems to be a nice-sounding way of saying "breaking something that used to work", which is a significant problem with far too much "innovation" in modern browsers.

Where are you going with this? A "browser" is a delivery agent, sort of like the paper and binding in a book. The content of the book can be innovative but who cares if the paper is?

Perhaps you are asking "Can you deliver the experience you want to deliver in Today's browsers?" "If not, why not?" which might inform the question of missing features, but such surveys tend to collect dreams rather than requirements ("if only the browser could read aloud the page, I'd make a kids book..." kind of thing where the thing holding back the requester is not the browser but their own inability to write a kids book)

So your feeling is that the browser is more of an invisible delivery mechanism, and not intended to provide anything other than taking you to your chosen web experience. Is that correct?

I think that's a pretty common expectation nowadays.

Back in the day we already tried the monster do-everythin-and-the-kitchen-sink[1][2] bundle with the original Netscape/Mozilla suite (currently known as SeaMonkey), and it sucked. It's only with Phoenix/Firefox lean-and-streamlined approach that a serious alternative to IE6 took shape.

The expectation of flexibility is covered by the idea of having specific tools provided in the form of web applications, not part of the browser itself. The browser should have all the features required to support those "innovative" experiences, but those should be available as development platform APIs, not in the browser's user interface.

[1] http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=2919

[2] http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/samples/ki...

Yes, exactly that.

At some point I expect a "browser" to be a piece of fixed hardware that renders the current Markup standards into a combination of screen and audio outputs. Perhaps with the option to 'spool to archival'.

We're going to get there because "innovations" in the browser space have increasingly put our personal information, and financial lives at risk. Nobody ever had to worry that answering the phone might suddenly drain their bank account, or install a surveillance device surreptitiously. And yet we have those issues now with "browsing a web site". As Pwn2Own has shown its a really hard problem to make a secure browser and the logical conclusion (for me at least) is to air gap the browser feature from everything else.

I think you might get less push-back on whether a browser should aspire to being "innovative" if you draw finer distinctions about types of innovation.

There's a big difference between innovative idiomatic APIs, innovating the first support for new specs/standards, innovative performance improvements, innovative UI/X, innovative plugin/extension engines, and (unfortunately) innovative interpretations of specs/standards.

Actually, keeping the response open-ended has been very valuable in understanding how people interpret "innovation" in this context. In the linked survey, there is an open-ended comment box where you can explain your definition.

Certainly; if understanding how people interpret "innovation" is the goal, a broad question is a good way to draw that interpretation out of some subset of 'people'.

I left the survey without answering because I realized it'd require me to make a broad binary generalization of some sort. Questions requiring generalizations like this make me uncomfortable, so I usually avoid answering them or dispute their usefulness. I came here to dispute its usefulness, but I saw a few others had already done so in their own ways, and thought my time might be better spent trying to give you context for this push-back, rather than echoing it.

Perhaps I can unpack how I mean "uncomfortable." If you ask me an innocent question like "what's your favorite movie/book/artist/album?", I have no good prepared answer to give you without vastly more thought than I care to put to the matter. I like a lot of things, but I don't maintain any sort of ranking, and I have no fast+meaningful way of comparing the relative merits of a good comedy with a good documentary, or a book of poems with a novel. I'm aware that most of the time this is just a throwaway question for socializing and I could probably grease the interaction with a little white lie--just pick something and move on. But I also know some people live and die by questions like this, and will mine my answer for what it says about me, whether we'll get along, etc. I could state this as my answer to the question, but the asker is either just making smalltalk and doesn't need a dissertation, or they actually think the question is meaningful and won't appreciate my disdain. The question makes me uncomfortable because it feels like a lose-lose. There's no honest way for me to "answer" it, and all of the other options are undesirable for social reasons.

In your case, I don't know what kind of parameters matter to you, and I lack a fast+meaningful heuristic for weighing whether a browser is innovative on the balance or deciding what definition/qualities of innovation I want to apply. I also realize you have some purpose for asking the question, and that using a cynical heuristic would undermine you.

HTH

It just seems a little odd asking people to share without any explanation of who you are or what the purpose of this is. For example, are you being compensated by some polling agency for collecting this data? What are you hoping to accomplish with it? What's your privacy policy with respect to the free-form comment field?

Sure, I'm an entrepreneur and fellow Hacker News reader (not a polling agency) looking to get people's thoughts about the state of the browser industry. All responses are anonymous.

Thank you to everyone who contributed. There were 205 total responses to the survey.

For "Would you describe today's DESKTOP browsers as 'Innovative'?": Yes = 29% No = 71%

For "Would you describe today's MOBILE browsers as 'Innovative'?": Yes = 14% No = 86%

However, the "No" category includes those who feel that the browser doesn't need to be innovative, and is simply a viewing mechanism.

By asking here your answers are so biased that they're unlikely to be useful. If you're interested in getting a statistically significant sample of a larger group, there are products that will find that group for you for relatively cheap -- I know of at least Google Consumer Surveys and Survata. (Disclaimer: I work on the former.)

Thanks evmar, we're getting a really good response size here, and are focusing on the moment on the developer/technophile type of users on this site.

Thanks for the survey responses everyone, and please keep them coming!

Since you're asking the community, it would be nice to later make the results public.

Yes, they will be posted back to Hacker News.

Are you happy with your choice of browsers today? Do you feel that browser innovation is moving forward quickly enough? Please sound off and take this quick survey.

Someone asked what "innovative" means. It's purely up to your definition of the word... but feel free to add comments to explain your thoughts.

We think of the tech industry as "innovative" but in many ways it moves slow as dirt.

Why do we still use IP/TCP when many of the same people who helped develop IP/TCP learned important lessons from it and moved on to new ideas such as RINA? We all know that including a port number in a network address violates the principles that the levels in a network stack should be isolated, so why have we allowed 40 years to go by, without doing anything to address this mistake?

We know there is a need for structured documents, and we have endless serialization formats for various ontololgies. We also know there is a need for a GUI that works over networks. We all know what a struggle it has been, for the last 26 years, to make HTML serve both purposes. Isn't it time we get rid of HTML and replace it with different technologies that can specialize in either being a GUI, or in delivering structured data?

Ethernet was introduced in 1980 and became the dominant wire for corporate and data center networks, despite more efficient formats being possible. Why is there such overwhelming conservatism in this area?

Polyglot programming has become the norm on servers, but the client has become a monoculture where Javascript killed off the other competing technologies (Flash, Swing, etc). An innovative browser would be one that gave us a virtual machine in the client that could support polyglot programming on the client. Instead, most "innovation" in 2015 is focused on making Javascript incrementally better.

"Browser" has become almost synonymous with the HTTP protocol, plus WebSockets (which still uses HTTP for the handshake). Wouldn't an innovative browser merely grant us a shell for handling IP/TCP, into which we could drop whatever runtime we wanted? That would enable polyglot programming on the client, and open the door to new categories of software being handled by the "browser". In fact, all software could then be handled by the "browser" as the "browser" would then become the most obvious way to enable desktop software.

For decades now, at least since the 1960s, programmers have been seeking ways to make their software multi-platform. Back in 1990 Patrick Naughton and James Gosling started working on Java, guided by the slogan "Write once, run anywhere". That slogan should still be our goal. What are we doing to move the society forward to the era when that slogan can be true?

In the 1830s and 1840s it was common for the steam engines in locomotives to explode. Early steel bridges sometimes collapsed, because engineers did not know what strain the steel could take. Our society moves forward when important technology becomes so mature and stable that the whole of society can depend on it. At what moment will computers become as reliable as locomotives and steel bridges? And what are we each doing to get us there?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com