@FinchHaven@SirTapTap And that seems like a major failure of us open web folks and also browser vendors. People shouldn't have to work to know. It should be obvious.
@FinchHaven@SirTapTap Eh, I also don't really understand how much of my car works, or what really drives the mains water coming to my home. That information is out there, but it's not a requirement for life, even though I use those things regularly. I get that maybe we should all know a little more about what we use, but everyone also has busy lives and their own areas of attention and expertise.
There is no reasonable analogy between your car -- about which even in 2023 you can still learn and do quite a bit about on your own if you choose to do so -- and the myriad sealed black boxes people blindly add to their phones so they can conduct their entire lives without having any idea how they're doing it
Or what faceless agent is sucking up every bit of personal information from the app in question, and the phone in general
@SirTapTap as someone who has experienced the "Everything App" in China (Wechat), I can tell you that its a different experience from a browser (or at least how an entire nation collectively uses it)
@SirTapTap You're missing the point of an Everything App! An Everything App is not meant to bring service and convenience. It's not meant to do "everything".
It is, by definition, a walled garden from which you milk your users' money, data and most importantly, attention. It's an attention siphon for profit.
Comparing an Everything App with a web browser is like comparing a Trojan Horse with a real, living horse. An impostor of convenience, a forgery of freedom. The web browser isn't an Everything App, because an Everything App is nocive by essence.
@SirTapTap the current “everything app” is your OS. Web browsers aren’t there yet. A lot of APIs are still missing/lacking notably anything GPU, storage and peripherals related is still sorely underdeveloped.
@SirTapTap And because it was originally open source, and based on an open specification, no-one can successfully monetise it (although unethical corporations need users everywhere to have the universal app in order that the unethical can monetise other things).
@SirTapTap I literally left my last ISP because they put all their outage and account management into an app and cut off the website. Sorry, I don't want your tracking app wrapper around webkit to track me
33 years old? Gotta pump those numbers up! Emacs is 46!
Every program surviving natural selection has or shall become an everything app; to quote @jwz:
Apps that you “live in” all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
The ambiguization of programs and services into apps for the general public was an intentional mistake so that spyware corporations can deliver executables instead of data, resulting in walled garden that can only be accessed by those with (soon-to-be literal) neural implants phoning home every other second. Let’s not kid ourselves and pretend that web apps riddled with client-side black boxes are any good.
(Not disagreeing with ya, @SirTapTap, just needed to rant.)
The Everything App is called #Emacs and it has been so for 47 years. You want a web browser, no problem. An organizer, email/Fediverse client that can help you typeset musical scores? You got it. Want a home-automation dashboard? Here's an elisp manual, good luck! 😁
First, I agree with you 100% on what the Everything App is, and that everyone should be writing for the Progressive Web rather than walled gardens (even permissive ones).
But I would contend that the browser truly became the Everything App in 2008 with the release of V8.
@SirTapTap just as Steve Jobs sold walled garden is great under the guise of flash was the issue & pretty much normalising closed ecosystems, wish he was Jobs conman will sell X as the everything app to mindless sheep including huge number in the tech sector.
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