Aral Balkan
State of the Web, circa 2023:
“Would you like to use the browser by Company X, or the browser by the company that survives on half-a-billion dollars a year from Company X, or the browser by the company that gets paid an estimated $20 billion a year by Company X even though it can survive without it if it wanted to?”
We desperately a web browser – by an independent organisation funded by EU taxpayer money – maintained for the common good.
Curious Carrot
OMG, yes!!!
Who do you think would be the best suited to fulfill this role?
Aral Balkan
@curious_carrot I don’t know but it would be good if we could filter out the right libertarians and the crypto bros for a start.
Instead of any one person being the figurehead, it would also be a good opportunity to use a flat structure and democratic decision making.
Aral Balkan
@jtb Cookie notices are the fault of willful and malicious interpretation of GDPR by surveillance capitalists, not the EU. The fact that we have a greater degree of privacy in the EU is thanks to the EU (which is in no way perfect, not by a long shot).
jtb
@aral No, not funded by the EU, it will just go on and on about cookies and nothing else. #eucookiemonster
Fabien
@aral * note: Company X, not the X company.
Aral Balkan
@fabienmarry Indeed.
Aral Balkan
@alexmckenna No, it’s not. It’s core is. But that’s not the problem. Company X using its monopoly position to dictate standards is.
Alex McKenna
@aral Isn't the browser of Company X already open source?
Aral Balkan
@steely_glint @Patricia We don’t need a few million subscribers, we have 447 million taxpayers.
Tim Panton
@aral This is exactly the conversation I had with @Patricia a while back https://distributedfutu.re/episode68.html
If I remember correctly maintaining a subscription based fork of either is a Multi million a year commitment - but that just means you need a few million subscribers.
Aral Balkan
@kpeace Kramer, I take it you’re a right libertarian. I know and understand your philosophy and, quite frankly, life’s too short. Goodbye.
Kramer Peace
@aral
Historically gov. have done more atrocities than private companies. I trust gov. even less than i trust private corporations.
The idea that we should force people to pay for something YOU (or me) think as good, is not moral.
I prefer that it would be done by private companies who allow a high amount of user oversight
skry
@aral The two browsers I’ve been watching:
Orion (WebKit) is open sourcing soon. So far only a Mac version though. https://blog.kagi.com/orion-features
Arc (Chromium) is Mac today, Windows soon, and seems like it’s made by good folks. https://arc.net/
Aral Balkan
@skry I don’t know about kagi/Orion (apart from it’s based in Silicon Valley by a guy who used to work at GoDaddy) but Arc is VC-funded: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-browser-company
Aral Balkan
@xavi92 I like this. My only addition would be that the browser manages “identities” for people so that Small Web places can communicate with each other via end-to-end encrypted messages.
Without controlling the browser that functionality requires JavaScript currently.
Otherwise, without JavaScript how do you propose ajax-style updates? With a declarative extension to HTML (eg., the functionality of htmx baked in, perhaps?)
…
Xavi
@aral The problem with the modern web is the utter complexity that causes hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on its development. We the community must ignore the "open web" specifications dictated by trillion-dollar corporations, and focus on a sane and stable subset that can be easily implemented by the community.
I had already suggested this very same proposal some time ago: https://xavi.privatedns.org/blog/small-web-browser/
Aral Balkan
@xavi92 … Although there are lots of tiny experience improvements that are currently only available via JS: eg., a chat window scrolling to the bottom when new messages are received, etc.
I guess you could similarly extend HTML to bake common behaviors in but I do feel having a client-side scripting language is a feature, not a bug. Especially since it can be used by the community to create the cow paths that get paved declaratively layer on.
So, yeah, I love the idea, though.
Aral Balkan
@xavi92 Thing is, unless we have identities (e.g. you have your own secret key that you can use to communicate with other Small Web places privately), we’re not solving the issue of privacy on the web. So if we want to attempt to solve that (which I do), we either need JavaScript (so secrets can be generated on the client) or extensions. I agree with you that compatibility with existing browsers is essential (or else, like you said, there’s Gemini) so I feel we need (a subset of, at least) JS.
Xavi
@aral OTOH I feel a lot can be already accomplished with HTML5 and CSS. Extensions are interesting, but I think compatibility with existing web browsers (i.e., small web sites are still accessible from common web browsers) is key for adoption. Otherwise, it might face a similar situation to Gemini, which made itself effectively incompatible with everything else, now becoming a niche protocol.
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