It could surf a bit on already established efforts in other domains and the narrative seem to fit with those ideas I think.
If intelligently produced text content is what is needed then perhaps we need to design a format that excludes, if not automatically diminishes, images and videos
Edit: I have not heard of it before this suggestion, but it turns out that this is something that already exists.
Gemini can also be fun for some mindless browsing, but has only enough content for one or two short visis per week (for better or worse).
Nowadays 95-99% of the web is the general public which means that it has turned into what TV was - the happy happy box to keep the dummies occupied.
If we only could. I'd work for free helping to build it. Count on me.
I just think we don't have to build one. We already had it in 1998. It's still there, buried beneath the landfill.
Overall I have a pretty long pipeline for getting new sites indexed, but should improve when I finish migrating to the new server.
I thought the name "Safari" was along the lines of the early dominant browsers Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
But today possibly thinking closer to one of those curated tourist zoos that you drive through with your car windows rolled up, or sitting in a small train run by the place?
As for in-app webviews, they’re not all made equally. Most apps use SFSafariViewController, which is an out-of-process Safari tab with its own app-specific cookies, local storage, etc that’s designed to give the user an opportunity to see if the page is really something they want to access and helps keeps their main browser’s tabs clean while also breaking several types of trackers. Of course though some notoriously nosy players like Facebook and TikTok don’t use this and instead implement their own which is chock full of tracking crap… this is probably an area where Apple could stand to be more heavyhanded (ban custom browser reimplementations except where those add demonstrable value or the app itself is a browser).
Also, web app devs aren’t blameless in user preference for native apps. For every web app done right, there’s three more that are shoddy and frustrating in ways that native apps generally aren’t (think breaking back button, scrolljacking, etc), some that are just plain badly built, and many that are unrepentant resource hogs. Often this applies even to web apps that have no counterpart native apps because their companies chose the web solely because it’s cheap to do so (resulting in cheap bad web apps). Are there crappy native apps too? Sure, but they’re somewhat less common and generally keep the crappiness somewhat bounded.
I agree with you. But I bet people 20 years ago were saying the same about the web, people never going on the real internet just being stuck in some "www.exe"
And app developers are doing everything to keep them inside the app with a crappy in-app browser which also benefits the Apple/Google app store ecosystem.
Apples intention with Safari was inside the name. "Safari - you're in the African jungle, theres lions and tigers, be careful, probably best avoided."
They don't want you using it. Download an app and pay us 30% instead.
On top of this, convenience seeking users don't really seem to care. Why bother with desktops and even google search when they have apps on their phone to do stuff. Nobody even trusts the web anymore because of all the SEO content spam and potential to be scammed