What the Web Could Be

Since the beginning of computer software, there has been a quest to run on different operating systems using mostly the same code. C claims to be able to do this, as does React and Electron. There has been a seperate quest to install programs quickly and safely. This has only ever been solved by the web. The web allows for opting into experiences without any install because the browser is the install. The browser is the engine that will run your software.

And since browsers are installed on every operating system, we have a platform, for the first time in history that installs quickly without the need for an installation step. And developers are rightfully building a generation of software on it. The problem, of course is, the browser's goals aren't being directed by technical conserns. And the use of a seperate scripting language makes the people who code the browser and the people who use it as developers, come from seperate communities. So in the way that hammers make everything a nail, Javscript developers started trying to code around the browsers shortcomings with the scripting language.

An example of this could be the Virtual DOM. A object representation of the Document Object Model, off to the side, diffing and comparing all in javascript. The real DOM is written in C++ and is likley a lot faster. The digest loop in Angular is similar. There is a render loop in the browser and every property of the DOM is updated "in real time." We head down the road of creating all these layers when the browser could be heading in a much cleaner direction, leading to a much more interesting internet.

Browser design shapes the internet

Imagine an application, written from the ground up. It includes parsers and rendering for all of the formats of the internet. From HTML to Markdown to JSON, it's all displayed well and handled natively in a fast systems level language like C++ or Rust. This is our browser of the future.

This browser should clearly have backwards compatibility for running Javascript and other scripting languages at their normal speeds. It should also have an internal byte code, (ala WebAssembly) that refuses a Garbage collector. Developers should be able to write in their language of choice and compile to the native byte code. Everything is searchable within a shared index and everyone donates a bit of their processing to this global index of the internet.

Protocols, (which used to be handled) are also needed. Turning newsgroups into data formats and displaying their contents using any layout system via a data API directly from the browser.