Thread · 9 tweets · 30 Jul 2021

There's a lot that's fair in the criticism here, but let's be blunt: can anyone honestly point to a single major browser vendor that's not a problem? I mean, you know I love you folks but this is some shit show. 👇

I spent literal years working to get the Web to native parity. WebAPIs, WebApps, DAP... In the early 2000s I built an engine that could build TV apps with SVG and JS. I still think it's a future we could, nay should, get to. But not now, not from here. Fugu-taboutit.

The Web has much more urgent needs than emulating native right now. Making it look, as the Chrome folks do, as if that's the priority is part of the problem. The Web should compete on what makes it fucking awesome rather than on monkeying what it's bad at.

Having said that, Safari should do way better. I get that full-powered trustworthy apps are hard, real hard. But I work for a company that primarily makes a news website. It's a disgrace that an app should be in any way necessary.

Mozilla gets a lot of free passes, but the Web would be in a much better place if they could focus on a problem longer than it takes for a kitten to get distracted. It also took them WAY too long to get to privacy.

And Chrome, well, I used to think that they were an ethical team planted inside Google. But then it became clear that they treat browsing data the way Android does location. And the health of the Web depends on data silos much, much more than on std-toast.

It would also be easier to work with Chrome folks if they showed a *little* more awareness that being the default browser on the top OS and getting free ads on the top SERP might have helped with marketshare.

And to be clear: Brave, Duck, Edge, etc., I love you just as much and I'd rant about you just as hard if you were big enough to make the same trouble for us.

But so it's no secret: the Web has a browser problem, has long had it. What, dear Web friends, is the governance model to fix it?