Quoting an anonymous Twitter user (got harrassed for these statements):
"Safari is buggy" is a valid criticism.
"Safari is behind Chrome in features" is not a valid criticism.
Never forget that the browser vendors, including Google and Apple, seized control of the web from the W3C. These few companies have too much power over the web, period.
1/8
The web has massive feature bloat. It's a privacy and security nightmare.
I personally think we should abolish JavaScript and not allow arbitrary remotely loaded code to execute on our computers.
"I want web sites to do everything a native app can do" is a suicidal mistake.
2/8
The more features that are added to the web, the less browser competition is possible! This is essential to recognize.
And Google knows it! That's the whole point.
Who can keep up with Google? Mozilla can't. Apple can't. Even Microsoft threw in the towel and adopted Chromium.
3/8
Imagine a small company trying to write their own web browser from scratch nowadays. It's just not possible! The web is so complex, there's no choice but to adopt one of the few existing browser engines: Chromium, WebKit, Gecko. That's it. The competitive landscape is bleak.
4/8
"Everyone has to adopt Chromium" is exactly Google's plan.
Who controls the dominant browser engine controls the web.
5/8
In a sense, there's no point in even having "web standards" anymore.
Web standards theoretically allow *anybody* to implement a browser engine. But if the "standards" are sufficiently huge, then practically *nobody* can implement a browser engine.
6/8
I've personally implemented software from scratch using RFC as a guide, in several different areas.
But a web browser engine? Forget it!
The "standards" now are nothing more than Chromium, WebKit, Gecko, and their individual quirks. How can there be a new engine?
7/8
The web is not "open" if nobody new can write a web browser engine. It's the illusion of openness.
8/8 Fin!
@alcinnz In my opinion, much of the HTML5 spec is actually pretty useful. Most of the unnecessary bloat comes from JavaScript. I also don't think we should abolish js, sometimes a little scripting is needed. But it's way too overcomplicated, and many many features should just be dropped. Let it control the DOM, receive events, and then let it stay at that. That's all it needs to be able to do.
@Riedler I've got a lot of thoughts here, but right now I think I'd say that for filling such a role, I'd say the Sun's hyping of Java at the time led to some terrible decisions which no one likes.
To make it reasonable to reimplement the DOM the standards need to be taken to scratch...
@Riedler @alcinnz how about XHTML2 + HTMX ?