Comment by shadowgovt

6 years ago

> Programmers should stop pushing buggy or incomplete software as is, and start releasing software that works

If you demand a perfection-of-function guarantee from something as complicated as a web browser, you'll never get a web browser with more features than the ones released in the '90s (and I'm not even sure we'd be that far along by now).

If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and "the software ever having the features I want to use" I'm also going to lean towards "the software ever having the features I want to use." And we know this is true for users in general because of the number of users who had Flash installed back-in-the-day in spite of the fact that it allowed a total bypass of the browser security model, because it had features that the browser lacked otherwise.

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shadowgovt

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scoutt  6 years ago

Instead of giving my privacy away, I prefer software like anything that you have installed from a CD-ROM back in the 90's and didn't needed a weekly update. Games, 3D-Studio, Autocad (to name a few) were more complex than a web-browser (a today's web-browser) and didn't needed a weekly update or the hunger for user-requested features, let alone dialing home because. The world worked relatively fine without the up-to-date wankery we see today.

  • shadowgovt  6 years ago

    I remember them.

    They were also buggy and could crash their resident OSs all the way to a stuck state, and if they did, the solution was "Try not to trigger that bug again."

    Software quality has significantly improved in the era of easy patch access and auto-patching.

  • scarejunba  6 years ago

    Holy Jesus. Those things were chock full of security holes. If you used a web browser that arrived on a CD ROM you'd be advertising massive pwnability.

    In fact, you could easily simulate this by using last year's Firefox.

    • labawi  6 years ago

      Firefox, chrome, linux ... all are full of unnecessary complexity. The point being - we need daily patches to keep it from falling apart.

      I have links (or lynx) on an old SuSE, maybe even a Mandriva CD. Would they be massively pwnable?

      4 replies →

JohnFen  6 years ago

> you'll never get a web browser with more features than the ones released in the '90s

I would actively prefer a web browser that lacks the features added since the '90s.

  • shadowgovt  6 years ago

    That's understandable, but it isn't what most people want---developers or users alike.

    Browsers aren't just thin-clients to support HTTP protocol and HTML rendering. They've grown to adopt a new distributed computing paradigm, not unlike UNIX and its descendants grew to support a new multi-user-cum-multi-process paradigm. The things web development offers---location agnosticism, platform agnosticism, combined multimedia interaction, a workable security model for multi-source aggregate-component content---are eating software development, and the browser is becoming the OS of the modern era. We know users want this because users were willing to use Flash (even though Flash broke out of the security model of the old browser).

    There'll always be a place for small text-based pages much as modern computing will always have a place for command-line tools, but the genie is out of the bottle and it won't be put back in.

    • JohnFen  6 years ago

      > it isn't what most people want---developers or users alike.

      I'm fully aware of this, and this, at heart, is why I'm certain that the day will come when I can no longer use the web at all.

  • flukus  6 years ago

    The mozilla suite in 1998 included a browser, an email/newsgroup client, an IRC client, an address book and an html editor.

    Modern browsers for all their bloat actually have less features.