[conspire] Browser 'Wars'

[Micah Lee]

On 02/10/2011 10:48 AM, Ruben Safir wrote:
> As a twenty plus year computer programmer developer and user, I'm SICK
> of browsers, all of them.  They all suck and trying to stuff the
> complete functionality of X11 into them is fundamentally stupid and
> working the problem backwards to accommodate brain dead OSs.
> 
> Ruben

It sure is a good thing that all computer users have X11 then. And I'm
glad that GTK and Qt are a breeze to program and design for, right? And
the software you write with them runs on all platforms out of the box
too, doesn't it?

It's true that the architecture is totally backwards. The reason web
applications have gotten so wildly popular and successful is because
programmers wanted to write programs that lots of people would use but
didn't want to have to write Windows programs.

But on the other hand, web apps now do some amazing things that are much
more difficult/never done before as desktop apps. It is the _best_ way
to write cross-platform software and real-time network software. It's
the most user-friendly and developer-friendly way to use computers.

There are problems, especially when it comes to privacy and proprietary
software-as-a-service (and proprietary web browsers of course). But this
is the direction that the internet has been going for some time now and
it shows no sign of slowing down. And it's not like no one is trying to
fix these problems:
https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto.en.html

Micah