Mozilla has a petition asking Facebook to stop tracking people's browsing off the site unless they opt in to it. Frankly I think the solution is to remove the ability to track people across sites from the web entirely, but I signed the petition anyway. Facebook has taken a huge hit to their reputation, so now is a good time to be putting pressure on them to change their ways.
@seanl @maiki If you killed javascript. Sanitized browser headers. Made browsers reject all content served from different domain address than the html your looking at, and somehow rewired DNS so that domain names had to resolve to a single IP address; you could squash a lot of it.
Though I suspect bad actors would still collude server side to track their users.
@seanl @satchmoz I wanna put this out there: we need more browsers. A lot more. I've heard the arguments against, including those frightening numbers about how many human hours went into the existing web engines, but who cares? The web is about creating documents that can be viewed in different ways. Anything else is reducing the actual benefit of HTML, and that means we need new, weird, beautiful and *many* web browsers.
Because then stat-mongers will have to adjust to new agent strings...
@Shamar @maiki @satchmoz We only have a few browsers because the web is so complex, and the web is so complex because people all gravitated toward a really small number of browsers. In fact there's an evolutionary bottleneck a decade long that goes through Internet Explorer. I blame Apple for sucking so bad for so long that they gave Microsoft a virtual monopoly over computing. Well, and Microsoft's anti-competitive practices but they didn't need to try that hard because their competitors sucked
@Shamar @maiki @satchmoz I think WASM is going to really shake things up, but I have no idea how yet. My main prediction is that it's going to impact a lot more than web browsers. In particular it could become the main application distribution mechanism and push everything toward being like ChromeOS (which will dump NativeClient in favor of WASM).
@seanl @maiki @satchmoz
You might be right, but this is not a good things.
That's just complexity over complexity over complexity, just to enable more complexity over complexity over complexity... ad libitum.
That's not just stupid.
That's evil.
Probably even worse than blockchain based cryptocurrencies.