But the Web became about branding the moment they introduced images and font choices. I remember designing a website for my local skate rink in 1997 that had a left navbar with buttons I did in photoshop and cut-n-paste javascript to add a lens flare when you moused-over them. Haha! Suh-weet.
I mean, for a niche certain audience, yes it is great.
But for mass market, people don't necessarily want to take on a whole new hobby in order to experience the thing.
Worse, it's contextual within the same individual: the person who wants to customise the car doesn't want to make their own sourdough pizza from type-00 flour, and customised web browser. And vice versa: each thinks "why waste time on that other thing"?
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Style_Presentation_Modes_in_Op...
I really miss old Opera and it's features: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_web_browser?...
It still doesn't have some of the later features of old opera, but it has rocker gestures, speed dial, tab panels, and a bunch of cool features for maximum usability in a range of workstyles.
They also released an android version with some neat cross-compatibility like accessing open tabs from other devices through the cloud and sending pages from your desktop to your phone.
Unfortunately, it seems most browser vendors are slowly attempting to destroy this feature.
"--Can you please implement dark mode for your site/webapp?"
"--Dude, just use whatever css you want."
It genuinely strives to do essential what the top-level comment describes. It presents content in a very raw form. All styling and presentation details are left up to the client applications. Gemini users are a small, but passionate, little corner of the internet.
Then another web will be invented with all the controls, and companies will use that instead. Web app proponents are constantly campaigning for more capabilities even today.
> There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.
To what extent would you vs the author control these experiences? The author may express their freedom by giving different experiences to different people based on how we respond. Then we’re back where we are.
There’s a bit of a freedom vibe through this whole conversation, but there’s also a strong element of control. It’s a “my house my rules”, libertarian, property owner, “you’re free to do whatever I want” vibe.
The author’s analogy of a company painting their walls seems off. It seems more like a wall that paints itself. And since this criticism is going against software I wouldn’t call critical infrastructure, it’s more like an invited house guest that isn’t singing the songs you want.
> There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.
If 0.1% of people can build and customize things, the other 99.9% benefit without having to work for it.
Spotify is the worst. Elements "randomly" change spatial location all the time.
The problem isn’t the lack of personalizabilty(?) or customizability. The problem is that we’ve collectively allowed providers of content to warp the www into a state where they have the ability to control our experience.
Consider what the web would look like if instead of html and JavaScript, it only consisted of a content description language devoid of any ability to control layout, fonts, colors, etc. My browser, under MY control, can present the content to me in whatever way I prefer. There might be a rich marketplace of both free and paid experiences that I could download and install into my browser.
Just because the web currently acts a certain way doesn’t mean that things HAVE to be that way.