Not so long ago, I was dealing with the browsers vs. Java applets war, which had a similar effect on many devices as they became progressively harder and ultimately impossible to use. The attitude demonstrated by many defending those browser changes -- as if completely and permanently breaking useful, long-developed, working software on a private network was somehow a good thing -- was somewhere between smug, dismissive and arrogant, and actually quite offensive in some cases.

I agree with you about longevity, though I think IoT is mostly a solution in search of a problem anyway, even if the hype train is clearly going to run for a long time yet. Connectivity is obviously useful for some devices, but most of the products I have ever seen in the IoT space weren't IoT to benefit the user, they were IoT to benefit the developer, and they often made the user's experience worse. The other day I visited a friend, and he couldn't change the settings for the lights in his home because his Internet connection was playing up!

Obviously, web browsers are the wrong way to control long lived devices.

There, I will respectfully disagree. Web browsers are, or at least were, a useful way to access devices over well-defined and standardised protocols that were supported on many client devices. They allow UIs much more user-friendly than a command line for non-technical users, and they don't depend on native applications for each client or customised control protocols for each product.

I've built many browser-based UIs for clients over the years with good results, and the only thing that has ever seriously broken them was when browsers started dropping support for useful, long-established functionality -- hence my concern in the current case.

I think its the "were" part that getting me. We had a standardized protocol: http which is now being phased out and a whole lot of developers of embedded systems jumped on it as a control mechanism for their devices. Now we have this crowd of other developers that focus on a different market segment and don't really give a damn about the problems that causes for others. "Move fast and break things" is fine for startups, but not for anything that our profession built into things. I just a little sick of a disposable culture. I agree https is a great thing and needed, but putting scary warnings on http that cannot be mitigated is a pain in the butt because at some point they will remove http entirely.

At this point, I honestly wish the embedded device programmers would jump off the web train and move on to something else.

OK, but what? That's the real question here, surely.

There are very few developments in the history of computing that have been as widely useful and long-lasting as the fundamental web technologies. The fact that certain browser developers are now trying to embrace, extend and extinguish those technologies for their own obvious purposes and without regard to collateral damage just means we need to push back hard against those browser developers. Google is already more powerful than is safe for our industry, and certainly we must not let it become the de facto owner of anything essential.

I'm not so sure. All of the web technologies have changed over time. I'm pretty sure only the simplest web pages from the 90's are still functional. Their are still computers sold today that can run IBM/360 programs unchanged.

The fact that certain browser developers are now trying to embrace, extend and extinguish those technologies for their own obvious purposes and without regard to collateral damage just means we need to push back hard against those browser developers.

Well, I still think the idea of using a document format as an application format was totally foolish. Frankly, something like a decedent of QML or even Sun NeWS would have been more appropriate. Heck even a networked p-machine with a UI would have been better. A frozen subset of HTML might work (well, could use WML and WMLscript since nobody uses that anymore). I think the whole push back is not going to happen. Instead we end up with a harder development environment than Visual Basic or NeXTSTEP with less functionality than either.

Google is already more powerful than is safe for our industry, and certainly we must not let it become the de facto owner of anything essential.

No disagreement there. They own the web and can declare your site removed from the internet as far as 90% of web users are concerned.