this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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I know this sounds bad, but maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Necessity is the mother of invention and maybe browser technology should be funded by governments instead of privately owned advertising megacorps?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I don't want web browsers to be changing all the time forcing me to do updates. Software that is complete doesn't need to be changed just for the sake of change.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (6 children)
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (7 children)

this is my most controversial take in computing in general:

i’ve always hated the browser. the reason there are only a few working browser engines is that HTTP and the HTML/CSS/JS tech stack is a gigantic pile of tech debt, and even using Chromium and Firefox you run into edge cases where, for certain edge cases, they don’t always follow the specs as defined in these ancient RFCs. and these specs: why tf are they treated as gospel? which software product specs drafted 50 years ago get this kind of reverence? why is it that other GUIs have had tons of iteration, not just of their spec but their full stack implementation (Wayland, .NET, Kotlin Compose, SwiftUI, etc), but we’re all just fine with this mess of janky boomer protocols cuz it lets startups get to market faster? why is downloading an entire app (less some caching) every time you want to use it feel less cumbersome than installing something native to the runtime environment where the protocols can be tightly controlled by the developer and not subject to whatever security and storage protocols whatever browser implementation decides is good for you? cookies? really? the browser should be reimagined with a tighter set of protocols that allow you to look at brochure sites and download content, ie apps. even the best web apps are a janky mess and have never worked better than properly developed desktop GUI. /rant

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is another bullet point on the list of MAGA stopping or confusing the flow and accessibility of information.

We are to know nothing about what they are doing in the world, ideally.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Sounds wonderful

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

So I spent two days hacking together a Gemini client script in tcl/tk. It's near 700 lines already, some of those are dead weight (client certs, stuck cause pki module in tcllib doesn't know of hashing algorithms newer than sha256), but it's usable for reading pages, viewing images, saving either and answering prompts, with basic history. A fully functional client is supposed to be doable in 1-2 days in like 200 lines of code in something. So it's a clumsy mess.

And yes, it feels like it's a lot of what we need web for. Suppose I got client certs working and this were a Gemini service. I'd follow a link saying "post something", I'd type this comment into a prompt and send the request, and on the next update it would be here, right under CN from my client cert used as nickname. One could have such links under every comment. One could build threads.

So maybe yes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

One browser tab holding a few YouTube visits consumes about 350 MO of memory. I think we have added enough functionality to the browser

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