[HN Gopher] Interop 2022: browsers working together to improve t...
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Interop 2022: browsers working together to improve the web for
developers
Author : twapi
Score : 101 points
Date : 2022-03-06 13:14 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.dev)
| nattaylor wrote:
| Neat. The big players seem committed and there is a scoring
| system to measure progress.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Shouldn't it be "to improve the web for _users_ " ? Developer
| Experience is important, but it shouldn't be focused on in
| isolation from User Experience. If we were just talking about
| improving an IDE, it's fine, but "the web" is about much more
| than development.
|
| Personally I think the way web browsers work is kind of insane
| from a user perspective. "The Web" is obsessed with technical
| expertise and custom code. An application like MS PowerPoint
| (pick any other design tool you prefer) is designed for _users_
| to create multi-layered media content and display it anywhere,
| without requiring a college degree or months /years of experience
| to make something. I don't think people who actively work on the
| web have considered how over-complicated it all is. For an
| industry that talks obsessively about "innovation" and
| "disruption", it can't seem to conceive of a post-web-browser
| world.
| alwillis wrote:
| If they get the interoperability right, the result will less
| JavaScript to download and fewer hacks. Users will get a faster
| and less klugey web experience across the board.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Yes. But faster doesn't necessarily mean better. I mean of
| course we don't want slow. But a fast loading shite
| experience is still shite.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Well, the MS PowerPoint analogue would be any of the tools
| users use to build content on the web today. My dad runs a
| Shopify store with a theme he liked and modified. My sisters
| use Squarespace for their projects and similar tools with
| massive theme collections to choose from. One of them,
| originally very non-technical, even learned Twitter Bootstrap
| when she wanted to go her own way.
|
| The MS PowerPoint user doesn't care about what the Windows
| application developers are talking about on Windows Hacker
| News, either.
|
| Also, I think we pat ourselves too hard on the back when we go
| "surely all this stuff is way too complicated for people."
| Frankly, things are just becoming easier and easier.
| askonomm wrote:
| I'm not sure this makes sense. My wife is learning front-end
| development now as I did 15 years ago and holy shit, to get
| an actual job you need to basically somehow magically become
| a mid-level engineer. Unit/automated testing, myriad of FE
| frameworks, OO and FP, CSS/Less/Sass (grid, flex, cascade,
| etc), multiple build tools, and this just to get your first
| job.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| There are places where improvements on both dev experience and
| user experience intersect. For example, if the big browsers all
| delivered a much more robust set of easily styleable standard
| widgets, that would benefit devs by reducing the amount of
| custom widget work needed and benefit users with more
| consistent behavior and reduced payload sizes.
|
| Things like that should be prioritized the most. Once all of
| that is taken care of, browser vendors could start doing cycles
| of switching between focus on dev experience and user
| experience.
| alvarlagerlof wrote:
| If development is bad/hard due to inconsistencies needing extra
| tools for cross-browser, the experience is likely to be worse
| than necessary for users too. Usually very connected. Never saw
| something good made with Silverlight.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| There's some truth to this. That said - speaking for a friend
| - (bad) UX designers and (bad) web designers consistently do
| more damage to users than a friction-y developer experience.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| Sure, but they're focusing specifically on things that
| developers are already doing but are just more of a pain than
| they should be, usually requiring hacky workarounds,
| preprocessors, or browser specific overrides.
| jdrc wrote:
| they can always compete for that though, but you don't want
| them to compete for the protocols
| culi wrote:
| The last feature vanilla CSS needs to render most pre-processors
| obsolete (imo) is nesting. The latest CSS nesting specs are
| looking great and it's kinda sad to not see it being prioritized
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| It's been a while since I looked into it, but are storage limits
| still a pain to handle across browsers?
|
| According to this article, Safari doesn't yet have properly
| documented limits on storage.
|
| https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Subgrid and reliable viewport units on mobile devices are the
| holy grail for me. Very happy about these priorities. Thank you
| to everyone involved.
| jdrc wrote:
| > New viewport units
|
| how many units does CSS have?? Shouldnt part of the improvement
| be to simplify and declutter the web's fundamentals?
| onion2k wrote:
| Apart from the duplicates (cm, inches, etc which can all be
| derived from mm with a basic calc) they all do different
| things. vw, vh, vmin, and vmax are useful for filling a screen,
| px is obviously related to the screen size, em, rem, ch and lh
| are relative to the current font or root font. There isn't much
| clutter there.
| silviot wrote:
| Obligatory XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/927/
| timwis wrote:
| I'm impressed safari is at the table. If I understand correctly,
| they only fix bugs once every six months, and don't give any
| indication of timelines as matter of policy. For example, hasn't
| locaStorage been broken in safari for ages? Or am I a bit behind
| the times? (Would have hoped to see that on the list if so)
| culi wrote:
| Safari has really stepped up their game recently and made
| amazing strides in a very short amount of time. There's even
| some features that they're now ahead of the game on (like color
| mixing and the new color spaces).
|
| Not sure about the localStorage issue. Are you referring to the
| fact that iPhones (and macs?) will automatically delete the
| localStorage for websites that haven't been visited in the past
| week?
| ksec wrote:
| We used to have ACID 2 and ACID 3, do we have something similar
| to ACID 4? Or at least a subset of features that are _guarantee_
| to work across all browsers. While Caniuse is useful for checking
| support, many times there are browser that support something but
| it is buggy or differ from one another.
| jefftk wrote:
| I think the closest thing to ACID these days is the web
| platform tests: https://wpt.fyi
|
| Instead of one giant test, we have tests for individual
| features.
| ishitatsuyuki wrote:
| Funny that the subgrid example actually has a screenshot from a
| browser that doesn't support subgrid:
| https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/issues/7453
|
| Well, that does say something about the dominance of Chrome...
| culi wrote:
| To be fair, Firefox is the only browser that _has_ implemented
| subgrid. It 's a pretty new feature
| userbinator wrote:
| I'm absolutely horrified at what the "modern web" has become.
| More complexity, more bugs, more barriers to entry for anyone
| else wanting to write their own browser and have it be usable for
| most sites. Google seems determined to squeeze everyone else out
| with this feature-churn.
| agust wrote:
| If websites/web apps are adopting these features, maybe it's
| because they're useful? You're free to use a 10 years old
| browser and keep reading document-like websites. In the
| meantime I'll be using all the goodness the web can bring
| today, hoping it will end up fully replacing the very costly,
| heavy, intrusive native apps, that only work on the system
| they've been built for.
| erezsh wrote:
| The problem is that there are so many ways to do things, and
| every website uses a different subset.
|
| Need to layout your elements? Great, that's what flex is for.
| I mean grid. I mean float. I mean the position attribute. I
| mean tables. I mean the margin attribution.
|
| I'm really looking forward to a better integration of
| Webassembly. Then we can each pick our own libraries for
| layout/colors/video etc., and writing a browser will be more
| like writing a VM than writing huge entire ecosystems.
| userbinator wrote:
| The problem is exactly that attitude turning what used to be
| highly accessible _and interactive_ sites into elephantine
| "web apps" that need the latest and most user-hostile version
| of $BIG_BROWSER (which doesn't run on older OS and thus
| hardware too) to do what was perfectly possible with
| technology of a decade ago, or even less functionality.
|
| I wonder what is more responsible for that; the fact that
| people don't care about history, or that corporate propaganda
| has pushed them away from realising it.
| agust wrote:
| If websites are turned into web apps with more features,
| it's probably because it's bringing in money, in the form
| of users or consumers, don't you think? If consumers tended
| to like simple "interactive" websites like we used to have
| 10 years ago, companies would probably not bother building
| modern web apps. But that's not the case. Web apps, in
| general, do provide a way better experience than simple
| websites, and users do like them. There is no propaganda at
| work here, just simple market mechanisms.
|
| If anyone is to blame for showing that a better user
| experience is possible, it's probably those who pushed for
| quality UI in native apps, that web apps are trying to
| match.
| tpmx wrote:
| They won that fight a few years ago.
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