I’m not too tech savvy so you’ll have to excuse me, but something I’ve been thinking… The impossibility of making new web browsers from scratch that can follow the huuuuge Web standard is basically because people expect to be able to do “more or less everything” right in their browsers nowadays, right? So maybe the “solution” here is to have more of a culture around doing things offline, torrenting instead of streaming, and then when doing things over the Internet, just having more specialized programs (and protocols?) instead of having an Everything Program for the Everything Protocol.
Yes and no, but I do like your thinking here. Using more specialized apps is kinda moving the complexity around, but the way the browser standards work also makes the problem way worse.
There are other cross-platform toolkits that are waaaay cheaper to maintain. We are just stuck with the one that Google is using as a “moat” to keep other web platform competitors from cutting into their profits, while pretending to support an open platform. The standard grows so fast that not even Microsoft can stomach the cost of keeping up.
As always, the issue is capitalism. Like, you probably don’t want to politically dictate technical standards, but we also don’t have any democratic method for tech workers to build and implement a sustainable standard. People do try, but they’re usually just trying to compete in the so-called marketplace of ideas and don’t really have a political strategy for building a people’s internet or whatever.
I’m not too tech savvy so you’ll have to excuse me, but something I’ve been thinking… The impossibility of making new web browsers from scratch that can follow the huuuuge Web standard is basically because people expect to be able to do “more or less everything” right in their browsers nowadays, right? So maybe the “solution” here is to have more of a culture around doing things offline, torrenting instead of streaming, and then when doing things over the Internet, just having more specialized programs (and protocols?) instead of having an Everything Program for the Everything Protocol.
Yes and no, but I do like your thinking here. Using more specialized apps is kinda moving the complexity around, but the way the browser standards work also makes the problem way worse.
There are other cross-platform toolkits that are waaaay cheaper to maintain. We are just stuck with the one that Google is using as a “moat” to keep other web platform competitors from cutting into their profits, while pretending to support an open platform. The standard grows so fast that not even Microsoft can stomach the cost of keeping up.
As always, the issue is capitalism. Like, you probably don’t want to politically dictate technical standards, but we also don’t have any democratic method for tech workers to build and implement a sustainable standard. People do try, but they’re usually just trying to compete in the so-called marketplace of ideas and don’t really have a political strategy for building a people’s internet or whatever.