It would appear that some people have a chip on their shoulder about the modern web.

Would have the original developers of Mosaic and Mozilla thought that in 2008, on a dual core, 64 bit computer, with gigabytes of memory, executing a simple text search in a couple tens of kilobytes of text could take measurable and visible tenths of a second? That displaying and formatting a single page could take long, long seconds of 100% CPU usage?

There are some reasonable points made – a few years ago, you would have thought that advances in hardware technology would make browsing the internet far more of a snap that it currently is.  (Try loading anything Javascript-heavy in IE6 – you’ll get through half a cup of tea before it’s loaded.)  Sadly, the organic nature of the web has meant it hasn’t worked that way, and this trajectory has meant that browsers are necessarily more monolithic than they might have been.

But aren’t we addressing the issues?  The browser marketplace is vibrant once more, and all the browser makers are vying to blow away the inertial dust of the last few years faster than the rest.  Besides, is it really an answer to remove all style from your pages and just whack in the odd Flash movie when you need something whizzy?  No, of course it isn’t, but it’s still food for thought:

It is impossible to get it right. The Web Client is unimplementable.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Interwang, Whimsy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.