
We are in the final years of our internet - toomuchblah
http://stupidiswinning.tumblr.com/post/40268049719/we-are-in-the-final-years-of-the-browser-and-its-going
======
moocow01
There is quite a lot of black and white thinking here which is the primary
problem.

Look, consumer technology is always a mess - apps vs web vs native vs desktop
vs mobile vs ... etc etc. The truth of it is that we have so many choices
because technology is meant to solve individual problems as best as possible.

There will never be one winner.

I think the author assumes just because tablets and apps are growing (I assume
this is still happening) that this is the end game. Its not - tablets and apps
certainly will be prominent for what they are good at. The app environment
sucks for some things. Free flow of information and low friction information
searching certainly is one use case where the web is so so much better than
apps can ever be in their current form.

Lastly "apps" have always existed. Nintendo games were for all intensive
purposes apps in that they were self confined experiences you played on what
essentially was a technological black box. In truth if you look historically
at how we have been using computing - things are more the same than different
- you just have to remove the silly titles we give everything.

~~~
betterunix
"There will never be one winner."

There will, however, be many losers, and PCs are going to be one of those
losers. The form factor won't die, but the philosophy and freedom will die. It
is inevitable, given the priorities people have and the money to be made.

If things continue going the way they are going, the only computers that will
give users the freedom to do what we can do now will be locked away in
research labs, available only to the lucky few who can land jobs in such
places. These computers will be so expensive that only people who are doing
funded research will be able to afford them. The next best thing will be
computers targeted at developers (perhaps "debug" computers), which will be
too expensive for most people to consider buying them but (hopefully)
inexpensive enough for hackers to get their hands on them; these will still be
loaded with restrictions, but at least the user will be able to write and run
code and use a debugger. The only computers that will be anywhere near the
price point that most people will consider paying will be those that are
restricted to running software that was signed by some large corporation (i.e.
only approved programs), with only the macro systems for a few "professional"
programs (priced beyond what most people can afford) being available for user
programming.

Why would software or hardware companies want it any other way? The next "big
thing" will have to be filtered through the app store system, and the little
startup that makes that software will be bought out before they can overtake
the established players. The big media companies will form partnerships with
the companies that control app stores (or just mergers, so that the whole
stack is controlled by the same entity) that will be immensely profitable.
ESPN will require all of Dell's customers to buy the ESPN app, without the
option to get a refund or to remove it, and any company that does not take
that deal will be barred from having the ESPN app on any of their products.
Governments will love it -- no more uncontrolled cryptography, no more
Wikileaks, CALEA-style laws for computers, and a chance to spot political
movements before they take hold.

"Free flow of information and low friction information searching certainly is
one use case where the web is so so much better than apps can ever be in their
current form"

You can just pay $1/mo. for a search engine app, right? It will have an
integrated web browser/hook into the installed browser. Not much different
from having a Bloomberg terminal on your desk, except that it would be
terrible for consumers (but profitable for businesses).

"Lastly "apps" have always existed. Nintendo games..."

Gary McGraw has pushed the idea that the security systems seen in video games
ultimately become the security systems on all consumer computing devices. At
one time, this app store model was something only video game consoles had; now
we see it on tablets, and soon we will see it in other form factors. Video
game consoles have highly expensive, hard-to-buy "debug" versions and
developer systems; is there any reason to think that such a system could not
come to exist for other consumer electronics?

~~~
jiggy2011
I actually don't think that computers capable of doing stuff other than media
consumption will get more expensive. I actually think the opposite will happen
and you can already see the start of this.

Look at things like Raspberry Pi , ODROID and arduino. Very hackable stuff at
rock bottom prices. With faster internet connectivity comes access to remote
virtual machines which can be rented by the hour and make stuff like huge
scale data processing accessible to the teenage hacker in his bedroom.

Ultimately the future will require more people to understand not just how to
use the tech on a basic level but people who can innovate with it.

If the US doesn't do this , another nation will and be all the richer for it.

Of course there will always be a market for passive consumption type devices
as well as specialised ones. It's just that these used to be radios , TVs , CD
players , calculators and nintendo consoles now they are iPads.

~~~
alttab
_"Ultimately the future will require more people to understand not just how to
use the tech on a basic level but people who can innovate with it."_

This. While in one sense it is profitable to rope off technology and control
it - having the general population embrace the skill set of working with
computers is far more profitable overall for everyone.

In 100 years, every single person will have grown up in a world dominated by
electronics with the presence of the internet. Being a fact of life makes the
barrier of entry a lot lower than it is today when there are more options.

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Lagged2Death
The #1 most-used app on the iPad is... Safari.
[[http://rjionline.org/news/rji-dpa-spring-2011-ipad-survey-
re...](http://rjionline.org/news/rji-dpa-spring-2011-ipad-survey-results)] And
given the nature of the survey ("Open question without prompts") I expect the
reported figure (21%) is much too low, because users don't even know what a
browser is, half the time. It wouldn't exactly be a shock if half of the
respondents who mentioned the New York Times app were really reading the Times
through Safari.

The bulk of the non-browser apps mentioned are ways to read things (NYT, WSJ,
USA Today, AP News, WashPo, Kindle app).

That is, the bulk of the non-browser apps mentioned are more-or-less tarted-up
browsers. So, for that matter, are the likes of Siri and Google Search.

I don't think it's the browser that's in danger here.

------
riffic
>Whatsapp has won messaging, text and instant. What will Twitter and Skype do?

Seriously? Operating a centralized walled garden does not satisfy any
definition of _won messaging_ when you consider the architecture of the
internet.

Nobody has won instant messaging until they all interoperate on the same
capacity that email is interoperable, defined by an RFC.

~~~
danielstudds
A standard defined by an RFC will be a win for consumers, not sure if it'll be
a win for companies though. If whatsapp can create a monopoly and make money
from it, that's a win for them.

~~~
riffic
We should be focused on wins for technology. This site is after all called
_Hacker_ News, not startup of the week entrepreneur news

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norswap
Punditry at its worst. I would have called it clueless, but the truth is that
nobody knows, and given evidence, this does not even seem like a plausible
prediction.

Sure you can say "mobiles apps grew so and so". But then I can say that given
the growth of a newborn child, 60 years old adult should be 50m tall.

~~~
hndude
Agreed. I clicked the article thinking it would be about how regulation is
threatening the internet. After 2 sentences I saw it was another article that
the old web is dead and that we will only use apps in the future... so tired
of hearing that line. As many others have stated, walled garden vs. free-
flowing information, etc. Drives me nuts.

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jiggy2011
This is somewhat all over the place without a lot of supporting evidence.

Is the author suggesting that the web will die, and be replaced by thousands
of special purpose apps that must be downloaded from the app store?

~~~
floppydisk
Peeling back the exterior and getting at the meat of the argument, I think the
author is really arguing that the future "makers" of things are having their
perception of the internet and computing shaped by their interactions with
walled garden devices and controlled environments. Building off of this, they
will proceed to continue perpetuating a world emphasized by unique apps and
walled gardens instead of the creativity of current and prior hacker
generations. What would be really interesting is if the author did a study
looking at past generations and how their initial perception of connectivity
shaped what they built using it. I.E. all the phone phreakers and hardware
hackers in the 70s and 80s laying the foundation for modern computing.

~~~
zanny
A more concise argument is that your Android tablet that is Junior's first
computing experience is significantly less hackable than your Commodore 64,
which was more hackable than your DOS machine, which was more hackable than
your Windows 95 machine, which was more hackable than your XP machine, et.
cetera.

Devices provide higher levels of abstraction from the tweak and tunables on
the system, but only now are we seeing devices where there is no easy way to
actually write code for them, on them. You can't write an iphone app on an
actual iphone, and I don't know if you can compile an apk on Android (I know
Java ides on Android exist, though).

About the only thing you can do is write web pages you can open locally. That
still works. And I don't see walled apps overtaking the expanse of the
internet - there is just too much content and experience only found surfing
old crummy html documents you won't get on your walled garden facebook app
experience. And Android is taking the smartphone market, while being
relatively open for a platform with the rooting and loading of any apk you
want (if you set the option).

~~~
dromidas
Really good (long) summary, zanny. That was what I had garnered from the
article's musings. It's something I've thought about a lot myself actually.
How would I give a child the opportunity to learn to hack or program if they
wanted to? For me it started with c-64 basic cause it wasn't compiled, then
visual basic when I was like 13... I guess C# or Java could probably be taught
very easily, but it feels like starting out learning martial arts by teaching
them advanced maneuvers. It feels like the wax on, wax off approach really is
the wise course but showing them QBasic or something hardly seems like a step
forward.

~~~
zanny
I'm sure if they have the right interest, they will investigate how these
devices work. It isn't as nice as being forced into learning a lot of it by
necessity of the tech (think TTY only devices) but I'm sure most who possess
the correct spark might end up writing web apps instead of bash scripts.

------
alcuadrado
Am I the only one who stop reading it as soon as I noticed that the author
confuses the Web with the Internet?

------
alttab
On that blog, stupid is definitely winning.

~~~
zero_intp
The insight and creativity with which you discuss the concepts brought up in
the article greatly raises the HN level of discourse.

~~~
alttab
Aw come on zero, losen your collar a little bit. I've conveyed my well thought
out post with brevity, pregnant with purpose.

------
jsnk
This was an interesting read that raises many questions, but much of the
analysis is ultimately flawed because the author confuses many concepts.

Internet is not a human-computer interface. It is true that most native apps,
non-browser apps on mobile and tablets use touch as the main point of
interaction. And it is true that many people browse web via http or https
using a keyboard and a mouse. But who knows how this will change in the
future? People change. Web standards converges and diverges constantly.
Technology evolves. Browsers today already do unthinkable things. There's no
reason to completely assume that the primary HCI of web will remain as
keyboard and mouse. Nor should we completely assume that the touch interface
on tablets are the be it and end all method of interacting with native apps.

------
gojomo
Every generation must discover, and embellish in its own way, panics about the
"Imminent Death of the Net".

------
dysoco
"How will our children learn to create digitally?" THAT is the problem,
tablets and smartphones are designed to CONSUME, not create: There are some
crazy guys who write code in their iPad, but let's face it, 95% of users only
consume content in their devices.

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chacham15
The only real insight I picked out of this was that children today are living
in a walled garden. Before, we had to know about drivers, installers,
executables, the filesystem, etc. Today, a lot of that is hidden. A benefit of
that is that the system is a lot more stable and people are allowed to
maintain the abstraction provided by the os. A question that Im curious about
in the future is whether the success of the abstraction will prevent kids from
peeking behind the curtain for simple lack of need. Lastly, will that in some
way affect the technological capabilities of the kids?

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mooreds
I have an iPad and love it, but haven't bought a single app for it. Sure I use
some free apps, bit what is the single most used app? Safari, for, wait for
it, browsing the web.

It will be interesting to see how today's kids get into content generation
with less keyboard experience and I do believe that tablets will rose over
huge chunks of the internet user experience--it is just too easy to consume
content using one.

But the end the open web of google and web search? And the rise of the special
purpose app for everything? I don't think so. Not as long as tablets ship with
standards compliant browsers.

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PaulHoule
I was looking through old computer magazines from the 1980s and thinking about
my youth when there were numerous incompatible microcomputer platforms that
had some popularity at some point such as

* TRS-80 Models I and III * VIC 20, C-64, C-128 * Apple II, II+, IIe, ... * CP/M systems based on the S-100 bus * IBM PC

and way too many others to mention. Eventually the PC and the Mac won out,
except for a few Amiga fanatics and a specialized "workstation" marked served
by vendors like Sun.

It seems the current state of things isn't nearly as fragmented as that!

~~~
DanBC
You had the MSX computers, but they weren't so popular. At least, not in the
UK.

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greenyoda
Any kid whose parents are hackers, writers, journalists, scientists,
accountants or any other profession that actually has to type stuff on their
keyboards will still have real computers in their homes in addition to
tablets.

For that matter, kids might still find machines with big displays and
keyboards useful, since writing an essay or term paper on an iPad probably
wouldn't be a very pleasant experience. (Or do kids not get writing
assignments in school anymore?)

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bzalasky
Stupid is not winning (apart from alttab's keen observation).

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smurph
Regarding the gaming angle, I think there will always be some kind of premium
gaming platform for people who aren't satisfied with phone and tablet games.
It may well be that the standard gamer demographic continues to shift to an
older crowd as we give our kids tablets instead of Wii's or Playstations and
they have to wait until they're older to get access to a real console or high-
end PC.

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chx
You voted with your startup creating apps instead of websites and your wallet
by buying apps that this is what you wanted. That I warned you
(<http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom>) doesn't matter but Douglas Rushkoff
warned you and you still didn't listen. So crying over the lost freedom is all
that's left, congratulations.

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hcarvalhoalves
The early web was scattered because there was infrastructure in place but the
initiatives were short-lived, diverged, or motivated by personal reasons.

It's the nature of our market - or maybe our culture - for things to
agglomerate and monopolize though. Just notice how it's more likely you're
wearing shoes made by a multinational company, not the shoemaker next door, or
even yourself.

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mammalfriend
I have kids, and I disagree that things are going to play out as black-and-
white as the author suggests. My daughter (2) does stick to the curated
appstore/app world on her tablet, but she's just as anxious to get her hands
on my laptop and uses it to do different things. Like typing "cat" into google
images to see cat pictures. Just like the rest of us ;)

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charonn0
Tablets and similar devices are great at what they do, but I can't think of
one use case (aside from extreme mobility) where they exceed desktop and
laptop computers.

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dotborg
I agree, we are in the final 60 years of our internet

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wglb
Bad enough to flag.

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joshuanguyen
when will URLs die?

~~~
scottmp10
It seems like you are implying that you want them to die. Can you elaborate on
this? I think URIs and DNS are pretty nice if used correctly. How else would
you identify things across protocols and the entire web?

