He also left Google yet still maintains his stance in the article, to my knowledge, if that's any consolation to you that he's not necessarily thinking about the topic from a Google lens, at least, not anymore.
It's an entirely new stack for apps unlike what the web is. Maybe that can be good for developers, maybe, perhaps, but gee it sure seems like a really bad bargain for users, user agency, and the technical legibility of our online world.
The HTML/CSS web isn't some panacea for extensions. The code is minimized to the point of being obfuscated, and JavaScript engines provide almost no introspection into frames or closures. After-the-fact extending these apps is hard.
I would very honestly rather be sitting around in someone else's Flutter app with the goal of making some extension modification to the behavior than in someone's crazy DOM-based app, as at least the rules are clearer.
As it stands, though, HTML/CSS are just too complex. I could--probably alone, but certainly with a small team--build a browser that worked fully if the spec were something like WebAssembly connected directly to something like WebGPU.
The idea of a monopoly on browsers at that point would be laughable: we'd have a hundred of them, made by every company of any decent size, embedded into everything, and that spec would be both stable and would matter.
As it stands, we have like 2.5 web browsers at best, and I'm betting we are going to be down to 1.75 or so in the not-so-distant future. And yet, we continue to make the web MORE complicated to implement, which is simply demoralizing.
We can't even build a partial / limited browser renderer anymore, as progressive enhancement is dead now: if you don't support the full set of features then you'll run into modern React sites just giving up and showing a blank screen: even a browser that was fully capable just a few years ago is now dead in the water as it won't have all the crazy new CSS and JavaScript features you need.
And, why are we making this so hard? Because we think that the web is somehow more transparent than even a native app? It really isn't. There is a reason why we had tons of really invasive app behavior extensions for iOS and you almost never see anything integrated when it comes to web extensions: it is because the web's programming model is actually much more difficult to introspect and modify for anything other than superficial styling or wedged-in buttons that add mostly tacked-on behaviors.
There was someone recently on HN who went and added some feature to Gmail as an extension, and they seriously just bring up their own pane and require the user to have Oauth tokens for Gmail from their app, and the reason was because it is just too difficult to reach into Gmail and massively modify its behavior... but we would do that sort of thing on iOS all the time and it was not just easy, it was fun! Maybe a browser could be built that would give users the same kind of extension ability for the web--by ripping through all of the layers of JavaScript scope optimizations--but no one is going to ever build that as building a browser at all is an impossible task :/.
> The parts of the web that have actually delivered are the ephemerality and the security model, the indexability (but only for content, not apps), deep linkability, and the platform-independence. We can keep all those, and throw out the decades of legacy that's holding us back, and we will lose nothing, we will only gain as we unleash the kinds of amazing interfaces that developers can build when you give them the raw bedrock APIs that other platforms already give their developers.
I also have to admit I simply don’t—can’t—trust a proposal to make the (path of least resistance of the) Web less inspectable when it comes from the general direction of Google, even when it’s honest-to-goodness Hixie writing one upon evidently deep reflection; the same way I don’t trust a proposal to make a compiler toolchain collect user data by default when it comes from that direction, even when it’s honest-to-goodness Russ Cox writing one upon evidently deep reflection.
(In the case of Go telemetry, I still remember how Cox responded to a privacy-related question I raised on HN—but don’t even remember now—by proposing the organization maintain an anonymizing proxy for its many employees. Which was a fairly satisfactory solution, if you’re an organization and have many employees. And it seemed clear his mind had no other cases in its working set. Maybe it’s just something in the air there.)
I don’t mean to pass judgment here, to be clear. Hixie in particular has done more to improve the open Web than most people whose explicit job it was to improve the open Web, let alone web programmers, let alone programmers in general (the only cohort of those to which I can lay even a vague claim of membership). I don’t even mean that my upfront bias here is correct or should be emulated by anybody.
I only mean to warn you that I’m just unable to engage with the proposal without considering its source, most of all emotionally, so you should keep that in mind when I say it and its apparent excitement feel bleak, like a coat of bright paint on a rusty playground slide in the midst of a concrete Constructivist slum.