So the "movement" against modern browser features is not a movement and has nothing to do with these features but its simply a version of "kids these days lost their ways" thinking. A version of conservatism, I guess. "Everything was better in the good old days" and "The new generation is horrible, the humanity is doomed" kind of thoughts are probably a manifestation of fading youth.
It is also possible that stuff are getting worse though. After all i remember friends of mine who were in university raging on how bloated the web was around 2000 and i'm 99% certain they weren't middle-aged men disguised as teenagers :-P. If anything i don't remember knowing anyone above 25y back then who even cared about web stuff.
After all having some people see and complain about things getting worse doesn't mean that said things will stop getting worse if most people don't care or even noticing them getting worse to do something about it.
When you look back, you can notice patterns: Something new and amazing comes out and it promises to take the humanity to a new age. At first it is fuelled by enthusiasm where believers work for free on it just to make it great and pay their bills by working for money on the old-school stuff. Their prime motivation is not profit.
Then this thing starts becoming profitable in the sense of bringing street cred and money and new kind of people rush in with their new ideas how to use this new thing. These new people don't share the same ideas with the original believers but they know how to build machinery around it to make it profitable and appeal for the masses. The new thing that was supposed to change the world becomes a concentrated and optimised version of the things before it.
The believers then become bitter purists and try to fight the new order by disowning the current technologies or methods and cater for the niche hipster elitist circles when the rest continues do their thing.
You can see it in everything, you can see it in printing press you can see it in Radio, you can see it in TV, you can see it in things that are not media: cars, clothing, shaving, coffee - everything.
Things don't become worse, they just become mainstream and that mass adoption is run not by purists but by people with no regard to the original ideals of the technology and masses love it this way and stays this way until its made obsolete by something else.
The feature where the cpu fans run after a webpage displays a table with about 30 items in it is pretty swell. Others might cry w.t.f. and avoid using such bad software as much as possible.
The feature where Firefox repeatedly changed your preferences and helpfully showed PDF with the JavaScript jank was pretty terrible. Changing that preference a third time won't make it any more charming. Yes, yes, the cattle are supposed to be OK with the "movement" of their cheese, move along now, nothing to see here.
> ... clothing, shaving, coffee - everything
Uh, no. Coffee in America started out cheap and for the masses (following some sort of Tea Party, I think it was) and then even more for the masses (now with pre-ground beans, instead of using the mill in the stock of your Sharps Carbine) and only very recently has there been a movement towards not-mainstream "hipster elitist circle" coffee made by purists.
> Things don't become worse
This is not what I've read; for example, British church organ making went through a rough patch around the decade of 1900 or so. With a little study of history more such examples could doubtless be found. One might even be optimistic that the modern web might pull itself out of the "big miasma"[1] that it has sunk into. But if the powers that be are blind to criticism, and go on about "tooling issues" or whatever, eh, it might be a while before changes can be made for the better.
By the way, Arnold Toynbee said some pretty funny things about blind elites.
We aren't complaining about cool new features that the normies like though. We are complaining about the fact that some of us have gigabit per second bandwidth and still need multiple seconds to load and render a page. We are complaining about the fact that it is literally infeasible to build a web engine from scratch at this point, by anyone in the world. The problem isn't catering to every day people, the problem is praying on their ignorance and forcing them and us to tolerate a worse tool because they don't know any better. And when I say don't know any better, I'm not saying "they'd use Linux if they knew better" I'm saying that they legitimately don't know that over half (and I'm being generous) the data they download to render a news article is shit they're not trying to access but they're paying for, they think it just has to be that way for some nerdy technical reason they don't understand.
This is not about ideals, this is about foisting crap on the world that literally nobody wants or needs.
"original ideals" is a bit of a fantasy. Technology has always been used for both good and bad (and which is which is is subjective). It's human nature.
We always complain about bloat and slowness, then we build faster machines and networks and bigger storage, and software and content promptly expand to fill it all up and make it feel sluggish again.
For a chuckle try running old software on a modern computer (fire up dos box and run WordPerfect or something) and be amazed at the speed of the thing. that is why we built a faster computer :)
We've made machines so much faster that a lot of old software is unusable because its too fast.
One of my favorite examples: Lego Island's driving mechanic is tied to frame rate, so on a modern machine tapping left or right will fling your car 90+ degrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CmqbccCqI0
That's the Turbo button on older Intel machines, that could slow your processor roughly to the speed of a 8086.
I discovered this playing the old DOS RPG Drakkhen, where there was a tower with a shark in its moat, circling around. It would jump and eat your characters if they happened to cross the bridge at the wrong moment. The funny thing is its speed was based on the processor clock (the game was released in 1989) and if you played the game with a faster processor, the shark would be too fast to be avoided. Push the turbo button, reduce clock speed, problem solved.
20 years from now there will be HN posts like "In my good old days we wrote efficient Electron apps that only used 2 GB of RAM to display a todo list, today's developers are lazy, there is no need to ask the AI to synthesize such a simple app, and certainly it shouldn't need a QPU (QuantumProcessorUnit) to run".
Back in my day, when kids heard older people talking, they listened because they knew they were hearing from someone with more experience than themselves. Kids these days lost their ways and think that knowledge and judgement are achieved in youth and then gradually fade away.
Just kidding, back in my day kids assumed the same thing.
Also, this exact conversation has been happening since the web was created. Linked article is evidence of that.
I agree with your commentary along the lines of o tempora o mores, when you could argue the pattern remains largely the same.
In a more practical way though, some new things are good, some new thing are bad. It makes sense to adopt good stuff and cut off the bad. Deck? Mostly good. Requiring phone number to play a game? Bad. Naturally, it is a very subjective process and we are bound to disagree on details.
Not that long ago a family member tried to use the same argument used here ( its a generational thing; old people just hate new stuff ) when trying to convince that Venmo is actually good as I was trying to gently indicate that maybe a payment system that by default announces to the world[1] I just spent X on Y may not be the best thing since sliced bread. Working near that space I was amused, but each to their own ( and I certainly am not going to tell the guy how to raise his kids ).
This is exact conversation (modulo the web) has likely been happening since humans became a thing. It's an endless cycle and it takes a lot of self-reflection to step out of.
No. It's not about anything old; it's about stripping things down to their essence.
A browser that can render text, and not much beside the text, emphasizes the text of a page, which, for many pages, is the content the user came for. Everything else is fluff.
In modern times, "Reader mode" in browsers does the same thing: removes fluff to make reading easier.
Of course it's great that now browsers support advanced features and enable amazing interactive pages like https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/, or just "simple" GMail. But such pages, and such highly interactive web applications, are fewer and further between than most pages that provide value by showing just static text and static images.
This strikes me as somewhat dismissive. My take is that the concerns raised in 1999 are even more true now. The problems we have with low-quality, bloated websites with questionable content are worse, and the rise of 'software that knows best' is only accelerating. If anything, this seems precient.
Also notable is this statement in the context of modern SaaS products:
"Who knows whether a new version will be available and usable when the current one stops working?"
With SaaS products the company can go out of business; they can change the product on you without your opt-in, making it unusable (or less usable) for your purposes and there is no way to downgrade to the previous version; they can stop supporting your web browser; your account can get disabled or compromised; new policies and regulations on data retention and privacy could render a particular SaaS product unusable for your purposes.
What are you meant to do if a SaaS tool you depend on suddenly stops working? How do you install the old version and get back to work?
I completely agree with the criticism of bloat but IMHO that is a problem because the tooling to achieve the "modern software" is bad, not because of the requirements for modern software.
In other words, the criticism is fair but the solution of attempting to freeze time or even try to go back is not right. Sometimes though, when things get very bad going back to the basics and re-do everything can work.
Young me (win95-2k era) had this feeling after researching into older software principles. I think that it is not [only] the effect of personal aging, but also piling up of a junk on top of an initial simple idea in any area. We just tend to notice that with years because everything straightforward-back-then becomes complicated, and straightforward-today flies under the radar.
But for browsers there is an obvious need for apps that are not “vb in an empty vba-enabled document”. This ugly heap is only stable because an enormous effort and skill goes into making it so.
Most people on HackerNews remember when they were the target demographic for most software. And they no longer are.
If you're under 40, this is how we all started. The target demographic since the explosion of the internet is no longer software engineers. That feels bad for people, and they lash out conservatively.
Because they're not wrong - the software IS worse. For them (us).
I could agree to it, if only I didn't know so many non-tech people who also think that tech started to go downhill at some point - and specifically complain about some of the same things, such as forced updates and dumbed-down UX that actually makes their life harder.
I don't remember ever being excited about disruptive software updates. If anything, I'm more patient at sitting through an app update on a weak cell signal than I was when I was younger.
I remember the days of waiting for the early adopters, reading the reviews and letting bug fixes and patches get released before making an informed decision to upgrade, if upgrading was considered worth it.
For things like security patches, pushing updates has been a net positive IMO.
For absolutely everything else, it's a disaster. I always used to think that the "free software purists" were a bit too radical for my tastes ... but now, in the era of SaaS, I find myself agreeing with them. I want to own and be in control of my hardware and software. Let me decide if upgrading is worth it.
