The web’s evolution over the last decade has mirrored the American economy. All of the essential indicators are going “up and to the right,” a s

A clean start for the web - macwright.com

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2022-05-14 00:00:08

The web’s evolution over the last decade has mirrored the American economy. All of the essential indicators are going “up and to the right,” a steady stream of fundamental advances reassure us that there “is progress,” but the actual experience and effects for individuals stagnates or regresses.

I’m going to try and dissect and diagnose this situation, a bit. You can skip forward if you just want to read my casual, unprofessional pitch for a reboot of the web. The idea is that we could choose a new lightweight markdown format to replace HTML & CSS, split the web into documents and applications, and find performance, accessibility, and fun again.

The platform side is what changed last week, when Mozilla laid off 250 employees and indicated that it would affect Firefox development. Firefox wasn’t the #2 browser - that’s Safari, mainly because of the captive audience of iPhone and iPad users. But it was the most popular browser that people chose to use.

The real winner is not just Chrome, but Chrome’s engine. One codebase, KHTML, split into WebKit (Safari), and Blink (Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, etc.)