Mozilla has a petition asking Facebook to stop tracking people's browsing off the site unless they opt in to it. Frankly I think the solution is to remove the ability to track people across sites from the web entirely, but I signed the petition anyway. Facebook has taken a huge hit to their reputation, so now is a good time to be putting pressure on them to change their ways.
@seanl @satchmoz I wanna put this out there: we need more browsers. A lot more. I've heard the arguments against, including those frightening numbers about how many human hours went into the existing web engines, but who cares? The web is about creating documents that can be viewed in different ways. Anything else is reducing the actual benefit of HTML, and that means we need new, weird, beautiful and *many* web browsers.
Because then stat-mongers will have to adjust to new agent strings...
@Shamar @maiki @satchmoz We only have a few browsers because the web is so complex, and the web is so complex because people all gravitated toward a really small number of browsers. In fact there's an evolutionary bottleneck a decade long that goes through Internet Explorer. I blame Apple for sucking so bad for so long that they gave Microsoft a virtual monopoly over computing. Well, and Microsoft's anti-competitive practices but they didn't need to try that hard because their competitors sucked
@Shamar @maiki @satchmoz I think WASM is going to really shake things up, but I have no idea how yet. My main prediction is that it's going to impact a lot more than web browsers. In particular it could become the main application distribution mechanism and push everything toward being like ChromeOS (which will dump NativeClient in favor of WASM).
You might be right, but this is not a good things.
That's just complexity over complexity over complexity, just to enable more complexity over complexity over complexity... ad libitum.
That's not just stupid.
That's evil.
Probably even worse than blockchain based cryptocurrencies.
@seanl @satchmoz I've considered why I feel okay using the web, but others have trouble. And I think it is because I am so traumatized, so banged up from my childhood, I approached the web like everything else: don't trust anyone, until they gain your trust, and then expect them to mess up and measure risk.
I was this way in the 90s and my friends told me I read too much 2600. While that was probably true, it also means I've been practicing since then.
@satchmoz @seanl I don't think we can fork the web. I just think we can create better browsers.
If you want to despair, look at how fast everyone jumped on Accelerated Mobile Pages. We don't want to fork the web, we want to keep folks that live in Google or Facebook to not damage the rest of us. Users are complicit in enabling those companies to take more resources than it produces.
@maiki @seanl Monocultures aren't healthy biodiversity is where it is at, both in the biological world and in the technological world.
In both cases the vast majority of the hosts can be dangerously impacted by just a few bugs/diseases because their shared ancestry makes them all vulnerable to the same sorts of things.
@maiki @seanl Do we seriously think Mozilla would have caved to DRM in the web standard if there were more diversity of voices from a large community of browser vendors?
Do we think webkit or blink bugs would be so dangerous on mobile if the mobile browsing market were more diverse and they had less shares of the pie?
@seanl @maiki If you killed javascript. Sanitized browser headers. Made browsers reject all content served from different domain address than the html your looking at, and somehow rewired DNS so that domain names had to resolve to a single IP address; you could squash a lot of it.
Though I suspect bad actors would still collude server side to track their users.