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Where some ideas are stranger than others...

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
- Rosa Luxemburg

Webmaster was in on:
2025-02-15

The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Whither the Web Browser? (2024-11-04)

Snapshot of an early version of the download page for the 1990s-era mosaic web browser, quoted from history-computer.com, accessed 3 august 2023. Snapshot of an early version of the download page for the 1990s-era mosaic web browser, quoted from history-computer.com, accessed 3 august 2023.
Snapshot of an early version of the download page for the 1990s-era mosaic web browser, quoted from history-computer.com, accessed 3 august 2023. Also see the university of illinois' page on mosaic.

There is a core selection of programs the majority of us with the double-edged forces of working regularly with computers deal with on a regular basis. They include the standard office suite of word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program, a music and/or video player, email client, and a web browser. It's an astonishing thought, how many of us at any one time use less than ten programs to do almost all of our work from day to day. However, it seems there is an ambition among corporations selling software to reduce consumer computers to dumb terminals which run only a web browser, through which they will use "webapp" versions of those core applications. Quite apart from the blatant greed and obsession with control this ambition reveals, it is also an uncanny fun house mirror version of the emacs ethos. Emacs is of course the famous free/libre code editing program developed by Richard Stallman. He designed it with the ability to extend it using a dialect of lisp, and a default install has so many standard built in modules, including games, an email client, calendar generator and so on, that a person could effectively treat it as the user interface for their computer. It could even be a superior interface, depending on the computer and the sort of customizations the person working on the computer prefers, especially if the person takes up emacs lisp programming to make their own plug ins and adjustments. The thing rendering the web browser into a potential ersatz user interface on top of a dumb terminal is the advent of javascript, which loosely fills the role of lisp in emacs.

I have already written about how javascript seemed like a good idea but has turned out to be a gateway drug to serious issues from contributing to online insecurity, ballooning data usage, and surveillance to more minor ones such as interface monstrosities and broken drop down menus. Powerful as javascript can be, it has also led to a serious crisis in web browser development. The majority of mainstream web browsers are skins on google's chrome browser. The ones with officially free/libre code, including the minority that are variants of firefox, are afflicted by a development cycle designed to make it extremely difficult to keep them secure. This exacerbates the problem of how the web browser is constantly being pressed to be the "everything program," running every sort of media and meeting corporate demands to support DRM. This may seem reasonable at first glance, especially since it was a great development when images, videos, and sound were integrated into web pages and subsequently into the browser itself so it was no longer necessary to run a separate video or sound player when surfing pages on the web. But there is a point of diminishing returns for people browsing and researching on the web, and we have gone well past it. This has helped give impetus to claims that we should use "webapps" analogous to the applications run on mobile phones instead.

Taking a step back, the web browser is originally by definition about exploring and using the part of the internet referred to as "the web." That part of the internet began as thousands and then millions of hyperlinked html pages, and those began as a means to share scientific information. It made sense to integrate images, sounds, and even videos as these are all part of academic research. Unfortunately, this also rendered the web into an all too tempting distribution medium for pornographers and advertisers. These two groups are a pair of serious headaches (to put it exceedingly mildly), but they did not drive the confused development of web browsers as such. No, that sprang from the "web 2.0" approach to trying to get people in general to give up their personal data to companies running websites and trying to sell products on the internet. They wanted to make "the web" writable from the many thousands of computers people were surfing the web from. This meant they needed to capture attention, hence they focussed on development of online games, the grim things constituting the dystopia of supposedly "social media," and rapid production and sharing of cheaply made videos. All centralized, all struggling to find a way to make a profit at least cost. It didn't, and doesn't have to be this way.

I actually agree with the broader notion that people able to surf the web should also be able to contribute to the web if they wish. However, I do not agree this should be at the cost of their privacy, security, or freedom to have and make the fullest use of a general purpose computer. A better approach is for email and optional website hosting to be provided as a public utility, including supporting decentralized web hosting by individuals running small home servers. This would still allow for privately owned hosting and email service for the cases where that makes sense, and even something like the advertising-funded sites present now. Then the challenge of indexing and searching the resulting web would be a different thing as well. In any case, there would likely be far less pressure or seeming reason to push the web browser to become a poorly secured, memory hungry, poorly designed extra operating system.

In any case, I think the current mainstream "web browsers" are only just hanging onto that identity. The future of the "web browser" per se looks set to fully bifurcate at least for the immediate future. There will be the corporate funded and controlled mainstream web browsers, which are becoming large blobs of spyware encouraging us to perceive and use general purpose computers as crippled dumb terminals. And there will be programs focussed on browsing the web, with basic multimedia support without DRM and severe limits on what javascript behaviour they will support. They will be developed to be fast, secure, and configurable with built in element blocking so that it is possible to block advertisements, badly behaved scripts, and such website horrors as perpetually moving gifs. Such browsers could still be extensible, or not, although I suspect more developed ones would tend to be extensible. There are some genuinely excellent use cases for extensions, which is what saves javascript from simply being chucked out.

Copyright © C. Osborne 2025
Last Modified: Saturday, February 15, 2025 20:31:58