Paul Irish
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2017–2023
1:07:46 · 29K views · Dec 11, 2015
James Mickens's 2015 Harvard colloquium argues that browsers are bloated and insecure because feature races trump clean interface design. He presents a cleaner, more secure browser architecture (Atlantis) with a much smaller API surface.
HN cites it whenever people discuss rebuilding the web platform or what a better browser architecture could look like.
8 comments from Hacker News
> Doesn't every freaking mainstream technology suck? I regularly come across rants from significant developers regarding this issue. There probably is no way to prevent this from happening. Because worse is unfortunately better. Web technology is fundamentally different in that you have a big standards body regulating everything from layout down to color blending, then leave it up to multiple vendors to implement all that stuff at great expense and with long delay. Worse, it's all shoehorned on top of some "document model" than was never designed with applications in mind. It's a waste. To see what a better platform could look like, consider this: [LINK] this video The key here is reducing surface area. It's entirely possible that WASM will bring us closer to that, but the web developers of today probably won't like that. > I regularly and seriously consider to leave software development because of this (as I'm really suffering) but then I remember how much power it gives me despite the horrible faults it has. I don't know what you do, but I find web development to be significantly more frustrating than other areas. That doesn't mean there isn't frustration elsewhere though and it's definitely part of the job.
I used to get really angry at CSS because of all of the things that made it a bad fit with component-based systems like React. It made me so unhappy that I worked full-time for about nine months on this project, which was a React-like component system that rendered to canvas. [LINK] I got pretty far! But I gave up working on it when I realized that I was going to be pushing this boulder uphill for years. So what changed? I picked up Swift and SwiftUI, and it turns out that some of the ideas that I had were the same ones the SwiftUI folks went with! For all the web has given us, I think its APIs are holding us back now. I still think we need something open and decentralized that competes with the App store and Play store, but one that offers apps that use basically the same APIs and technology that the native apps use. Last thing: I know Apple cripples browsers on their platforms. I've run into all those issues personally in my work! That still doesn't make the web the right thing. Here's James Mickens telling us how to fix the browser's busted architecture: this video
James Mickens gave an interesting talk on what we could do to build a better browser: this video I'm hoping that WebAssembly might be a route towards allowing something like this to happen. If an alternative to HTML/CSS/JS could be developed in WebAssembly, then we could have a situation where HTML has competition, rather than being the only way to build a website. And browsers can become simpler as the rendering duties are moved out of the browser and to the website itself.
James Mickens has a talk about doing exactly this [1]. It's a perfectly sensible proposal and the talk is well worth the time to listen to. He makes a solid argument for why this should be done. Problem: in reality, it is unworkable and will never happen, and even if it did the actual level of "development" that we actually see in the real world would end up in a situation just as bad as the situation we are in now. [1] this video
James Mickens at Microsoft Research presents Atlantis, which I definitely think this still the most forward-looking browser architecture out there: this video Ideas from this effort are going to be trickling into browsers for years to come. For example, if you squint a bit, you might see a conceptual resemblance between the Syphon interpreter in Atlantis and WASM in shipping browsers.