The modern web - It needs to die - Intro
The modern web is a blight on the face of society. Time for a rant!
Oh dear… where on earth do I start with this topic. There are so many things I would love to go into and I just don’t feel like I should cover it all in one go so I am going to make this an article series of sorts. The web is in such an awful state but it seems to be the accepted industry standard at this point and I think that is quite a disservice to humanity. Not everyone has top-of-the-line desktop PCs to load Youtube.
I know many people over the years who would take what may seem like the sensible approach and try to save some cash when purchasing a new computer. They may reason that, as long as they aren’t going to be running a resource intensive task, they shouldn’t need the extra horsepower in their workstation. Unfortunately, it seems that the difference between being able to use your computer for most common daily-tasks and having it be completely unusable is whether or not you can afford a reasonable high-end rig.
If you go the route in the aforementioned scenario you may find yourself frustrated with all the things that don’t work quite right. Websites will take longer to load than they used to back when the web was the thing you could access on any old toaster you had lying around the house and webapps will likely be near unusable in-terms of performance. Yes, it seems that despite the claims of “the free and open web” being an accessible technology for all, the reality is quite a stark contrast.
I won’t go over the details in this particular article since I don’t have the detailed numbers and data, but I would like to offer a simple test to prove my point: Try to run your fancy webapp on a low-end ARM-based chromebook or low-end RCA Android tablet. Now imagine what would happen if every app performed like that all the time; often times not even being able to load and freezing the device because of the amount of processing power required to handle the concept of a “webapp”.
With this article series, I intend to prove that webapps are, in and of themselves, a broken idea. I intend to prove that the idea of “write once, run everywhere” is a determent to society when applied to things too large for it. I also intend to prove that the Web, if continued in it’s current form, needs to die outright and be replaced by a more limited system (I would personally prefer Gemini) that can’t be turned into a horrifically slow and cobbled together platform for serving software with a protocol that wasn’t designed for it.
I intend to do some in-depth research and a fair amount of number cruching in future articles in this series. Please stay tuned.