It really comes down to JavaScript. The web was fine when sites were static HTML, images, and forms with server-side rendering (allowing for forums and blogs).
Did you use the web back in 1995? It was fun, but it also sucked compared to what we have now. Nothing is ever perfect, but I wouldn’t want to go back.
Geminispace is a very chill place. It’s definitely not a replacement for the web, but if you can handle the compromises, it feels like both the past and the future.
People seem to think it was better becausee the technology was simpler. Except the “problem” in question is entirely about popularity, once the internet became pretty much an essential service of the common household it also became the new target for profit-seeking enterprises.
Nothing to do with the technology, everything to do with the people. When you say you want to “go back to the good old days” what you’re actually saying is “I want fewer people to have access to the internet”.
I read epubs, and html pages derived from texinfo and mandoc. When I see websites that just break down when you disable JS (I do it with ublock), I always feel a pang of sadness. Unless you’re Figma, Google doc, or OpenStreetMap…, which rely heavily on local state, JS should only be required for small island of interaction.
I published my first website in 1995 (and while it wasn’t even a little popular, eventually a spammy gay porn site popped up with the exact same joke name, leading to a pretty odd early “what if you search for your own site” experience).
If you put 2026 media players (with modern bandwidth), on the manually curated small-editorial web of ‘95 it’d be amazing.
We used to have desktop apps, these SPA JS monstrosities are the result of MS missing the web then MS missing mobile. Instead of a desktop monopoly where ActiveX could pop up (providing better app experiences in many cases than one would think), we have cross-platform electron monstrosities and fat react apps that suck, are slow, and omfgbbq do they break. And suck. And eat up resources. Copy and paste breaks, scrolling breaks, nav gets hijacked, dark mode overridden.
Netflix, Spotify, MS have apps I see breaking on the regular on prime mainstream hardware. My modern gaming windows laptop, extra juicy GPU for all the LLM and local kubernetes admin, chokes on windows rendering. Windows isn’t just regressing, their entire stack is actively rotting, and all behind fancy web buttons.
Old man yelling at cloud, but: geeeez boys, I want to go back.
There are still BBS you can access via telnet (and actual dial up if you really want), after the fifth one asks you for your full name, street address and phone Humber it gets a little old.
You're not wrong but we've never really tried the combination of modern CSS with no JS. It could produce elegant designs that load really fast... or ad-filled slop but declarative.
Yes to the modern CSS. To go as far back as suggested would mean using frames again and table based layouts with 1x1 invisible gifs to use for spacing layouts. Never again!
Oh, the social media was much, much better. People much more open, tracking didn't exist. All the idiots still thought computers were only a thing for nerds and kids.
JavaScript didn’t kill Flash a Java. The web becoming cross platform did.
People started browsing on a plethora of devices from the Dreamcast to PDAs. And then Steve Jobs came a long and doubled down on the shift in accessibility. His stance on Flash was probably the only thing I agreed with him on too.
If you wanted to accomplish anything more substantial than reading static content (like an email client that beeps when you get an important email, or a chat app that shows you new messages as they come in), you needed to install a desktop app. That required you to be on the same OS that the app developer supported (goodbye Linux on the desktop), as well as to trust the dev a lot more.
We seem to have collectively forgotten the trauma of freeware. Operating an installer in the mid 2000s was much like walking through a minefield; one wrong move, and your computer was infected with crapware that kept changing your home page and search engine. It wasn't just shady apps, mainstream software (I definitely remember uTorrent and Skype doing this) was also guilty. Even updates weren't safe.
I use a desktop mail client. I have always used desktop applications. I have never had any desire to use web mail clients. Likewise for office suite applications. A true desktop spreadsheet, word processor, and slide deck are always superior.
The web as an application platform has always been a half-baked, second class, inferior experience for the user. It has always been about developer convenience at the expense of the user. No thank you!
Somehow we have cross platform software today that isn't Electron slop. And shoehorning absolutely everything into what used to be a document oriented application, creating this grotesque mutant abomination we have today, has just moved the minefield. How many RCE's has Chromium had?
Also, up until Windows Vista, Microsoft thought that making every account on their OS root by default was an amazing idea, further exacerbating the problem you describe, which I don't deny existed. Software distribution on Windows is still a shit-show today, but I guess there's too much momentum to move to a Linux-style repository. The Microsoft Store is a piss poor attempt.
For a tool people come to depend on for their daily computing needs, this is wildly pessimistic. Look how many people use Unix shell tools on a daily basis. Some of that stuff is 60 years old! Imagine paying a subscription for 60 years to use bash.
There will always be a shortage of money for medical care. The dirty secret of social medicine is that a small percentage of the population are essentially unhappy utility monsters [1] who gain little or no benefit no matter how many resources are poured into treating them.
Now what we need is a cheap grid interconnect for home users running solar panels that automatically starts charging a battery when grid prices go negative, to absorb that extra power.
It's possible on the Mac, but it's not easy. Apple uses an immutable system volume on macOS, so you can't just delete the Safari app like you would a user-installed app. To actually delete Safari you need to disable System Integrity Protection and reboot.
There are plenty of Linux distributions that use immutable root volumes. They protect the user in a huge number of ways by preventing the system from getting hosed (either by accident or by malicious unauthorized users / malware). Apple made the decision to do this for their users, and it has prevented a HUGE amount of tech support calls, as well as led to millions of happy users with trouble-free computers.
It also hasn't stopped users from installing Chrome and/or Firefox on their Macs, and millions of ordinary users have.
> It also hasn't stopped users from installing Chrome and/or Firefox on their Macs, and millions of ordinary users have.
You seem to be ignoring the part where you can't install the Chome and/or Firefox browser engines on iOS and the apps with those names on that platform are just skins over Safari. Notice in particular that the iOS version of "Firefox" can't support extensions.
> Let me know how I can unbundle Safari from macOS or iOS.
> Go ahead, I'll wait.
You can't get even macOS from the store without Safari, which is the thing Microsoft was doing, but what Apple does on iOS is far worse than what Microsoft was doing and talking about only macOS is kind of burying the lede.
For MacOS this is just as dumb of an argument as it was for Windows. The web engine is used to render system dialogs. You can easily choose a doffeeent browser on Macs. Chrome has quite a large market share on Macs
What next? Do you want to unbundle the built in drivers?
The argument for Windows is that you pay for Windows, and used to pay for Netscape Navigator, but now you have to get Internet Explorer if you want Windows. You can't say that you want to pay e.g. $160 for Windows without Internet Explorer and then $40 for Netscape, your only option is to pay $200 for Windows + Internet Explorer. It's tying. It's not really about whether you can remove it, it's about whether you can not pay for it when you don't want it. Notice that they quite successfully bankrupted Netscape with this.
The inability to remove it is just the dodge Microsoft attempted to use to claim that they're inseparably the same product, and was clearly a load of self-serving nonsense. Operating systems had system dialogs before there was any such things as browser engines.
The dynamic looks weird from the frame of reference of the modern browser market because the answer the market found to Microsoft's tying was to "pay for" the browser by allowing the vendor to choose the default search engine. No surprise then that the browser that ultimately supplanted Microsoft's was the one from the biggest search engine company. But that workaround came with negative consequences, e.g. Google now crippling ad blockers in Chrome.
And the tying problem is still there even if markets with low marginal costs are often weird. Okay, so the way we pay for browsers now is by letting the vendor choose the default search engine, but now we have Google paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine in Safari, and Apple quashing Firefox ad blockers on iOS, instead of that money going to Mozilla or Ladybird or anyone else who has to compete by making a better browser instead of "competing" by tying use of their browser to an operating system, with correspondingly fewer resources and market share for competing alternatives.
> What next? Do you want to unbundle the built in drivers?
Making Asahi Linux get there by full reverse engineering actually is kind of a dick move? Intel publishes hardware documentation.
And it seems pretty obvious that Apple is tying their OS to their hardware and vice versa. Is that even supposed to be ambiguous?
And that argument is dumb in 2026. What are they supposed to do, use ftp to download a web browser?
> Notice that they quite successfully bankrupted Netscape with this.
Were you around back then? Absolutely no one paid for Netscape even before IE. And famously what bankrupted Netscape was because it “did things you should never do”.
Netscape was trying to make money selling web servers also. Should Linux and Windows not come with web servers? Should Apache not have been free?
People seem to forget that Netscape sucked around the time IE came out. It was so crash prone on every operating system it ran on that people use to brag on .advocacy groups about how good their operating systems were by how well they handled Navigator crashes.
And there has never been a point that Microsoft had to unbundle their browser in the US and there was never a browser choice screen.
> And it seems pretty obvious that Apple is tying their OS to their hardware and vice versa. Is that even supposed to be ambiguous?
This is about as bad of an argument as saying that Fors ties its motor to its cars or Nintendo forcing you to use their OS with their consoles. Apple doesn’t sell operating system, Apple sells computer products. What do you think should happen? Force Apple to create versions of its operating systems that run on other computers? Force Apple to sell Macs without operating systems? Anyone is free to choose an x86 PC and 90% of the market does
Firefox is also free to bundle an ad blocker with Firefox even if it does use WebKit and when you download Firefox for iOS - they get money from searches.
Are you suggesting that iOS shouldn’t come with a browser? Should ChromeOS also not come with a browser?
Absolutely no computer operating system comes bundled with Chrome besides ChromeOS yet Chrome still has the majority of the market share on desktop computers. Firefox competes with Chrome on an equal playing field on computers - people choose Chrome
> What are they supposed to do, use ftp to download a web browser?
How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one, or give the customer a choice which browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc.
> And famously what bankrupted Netscape was because it “did things you should never do”.
Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows 95. The Netscape release before they attempted to rewrite was released in 1997. The rewrite was a failed attempt to make their browser good enough that people would pay for it when Microsoft was already bundling IE with Windows.
> And there has never been a point that Microsoft had to unbundle their browser in the US and there was never a browser choice screen.
Indeed, Microsoft successfully paid off the Bush administration to settle the case for a slap on the wrist after they'd already been found guilty by the court.
> This is about as bad of an argument as saying that Fors ties its motor to its cars or Nintendo forcing you to use their OS with their consoles.
Ford will happily sell you a motor without an entire car, or a frame or any other part of the car without a motor. Nintendo is forcing you to use their OS with their consoles.
> Force Apple to create versions of its operating systems that run on other computers?
This makes it sound like it's someone making Apple do something instead of Apple making someone do something.
What stops you from running macOS in qemu or a virtual machine on any non-Apple hardware with the same architecture? What stops Samsung from writing iOS drivers and offering iOS on Galaxy phones? Only Apple's refusal to sell it to you without making you also buy hardware.
> Anyone is free to choose an x86 PC and 90% of the market does
60% of phones in the US are iOS.
> Firefox is also free to bundle an ad blocker with Firefox even if it does use WebKit and when you download Firefox for iOS - they get money from searches.
The Firefox ad blockers are extensions, e.g. uBlock isn't from Mozilla, but the ability to use it is a reason to use Firefox. The iOS browsers can't use extensions. Then you can't use uBlock on iOS and fewer people use Firefox.
> Absolutely no computer operating system comes bundled with Chrome besides ChromeOS
Android. And then people who want to use the same browser on desktop and mobile for sync.
> yet Chrome still has the majority of the market share on desktop computers. Firefox competes with Chrome on an equal playing field on computers - people choose Chrome
Chrome is made by the largest advertising company in the world. For years if you opened google.com, gmail or their other services in a non-Chrome browser you would get a huge banner imploring you to install Chrome. This was a successful strategy to overcome the inertia of the default browser on desktop operating systems, but Mozilla never had anything like that available to them, and then the two-front assault from Microsoft/Apple on one side and Google on the other resulted in declining Firefox market share and correspondingly declining revenue with which to improve it.
Mozilla the organization also suffers from significant mismanagement, but that doesn't explain why no one has been able to establish a popular fork or new independent browser, whereas the OS vendors successfully impeding anyone who can't command the equivalent of billions in advertising explains it really well.
> How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one, or How about, sell the product without restricting retailers from replacing the vendor's browser with another one,
PC vendors have been and do ship any type of crapware they want on their computers.
> or give the customer a choice which browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc. browser they want the same as they choose how much RAM they want etc.
And when they had that choice in Europe - they mostly still chose Chrome…
> Android. And then people who want to use the same browser on desktop and mobile for sync.
And those people can still download Firefox on iOS or Android and sync bookmarks.
In fact Firefox and Chrome Windows users can sync their bookmarks to iOS Safari using extension written and supported by Apple.
> What stops you from running macOS in qemu or a virtual machine on any non-Apple hardware with the same architecture? What stops Samsung from writing iOS drivers and offering iOS on Galaxy phones? Only Apple's refusal to sell it to you without making you also buy hardware.
Is that really a reasonable argument when Samsung doesn’t even support its own hardware with drivers for more than a couple of years?
> whereas the OS vendors successfully impeding anyone who can't command the equivalent of billions in advertising explains it really well.
Just maybe Firefox - which is free to compete with Google on desktop computers just doesn’t make a compelling case for why no one wants it?
Induction requires your cookware to sit flat against the surface or it won’t heat up (and the range will shut off after a certain time). With natural gas the flames rise through convection and wrap around the contours of the pan. This means many traditional pieces of cookware with round bottoms simply will not work on induction but work fine on natural gas.
Induction also requires the cookware to be ferromagnetic. This rules out a lot of traditional cookware materials such as clay, copper, brass, and stone. Many of these traditional materials are also accompanied by traditional shapes (round bottoms, gently sloped sides) that take advantage of the convection properties of open flame cooking.
Many recipes rely on these traditional vessels for optimal cooking performance. Woks, for example, work much better with a round bottom so liquids can pool in the middle, letting you use less oil for stir frying but still allowing ingredients to spend time in the pooled oil.
The temperature profile of a round-bottom wok over gas flame is also superior to a flat-bottom wok on induction: the traditional wok has a bright hot spot at the bottom (where all the oil is pooling) in addition to heat up all around the sloped sides, for rapidly reducing liquids that come out of foods and cooking sauces (soy sauce, shaoxing wine) with an arc-splash technique. The flat-bottom wok on induction has a uniformly hot surface on the bottom but the sides remain cool, causing all liquids in contact with the sides to run down to the bottom and begin boiling, just like when you try to stir-fry in a frying pan.
Candy-making is another cooking process that benefits greatly from the convection of natural gas combustion, since molten sugar will crystallize around the sides of a pan if they are not hot enough. Traditional candy-making is done in thin-walled, tin-lined copper pans. These pans don't work at all on induction (no ferromagnetic materials) but even if placed on a ferrous plate they would not perform well due to lack of heating of the sides.
There's a misconception that Chinese food requires a 50,000 BTU burner causing "wok hei" to be right. The truth is that Chinese cuisine is huge and varied. Some regional dishes do actually require that. Most do not and can be cooked at home.
An equivalent induction stove would be around 5000W, which I think exists. The problem with inductioning a wok is the tossing motion removes the wok from the heat, unlike over a big flame. It probably doesn't matter, but maybe it does.
The main difference is that the gas instantly turns off, whereas with induction, the stove surface the pan sits on is just as hot as the pan, because the pan heats it up via contact, so it's almost like electric in that way. I kind of doubt this matters except in certain specialty things like candy making. I'd consider myself a very proficient chef at the level of a new culinary school graduate (minus the restauranteering modules), and in practice any stove type is just fine. I'm not going to rip out my gas stove though; it came with the house and adds resale value.
Woks aren't the only shape of cookware with a non-flat bottom and/or a non-ferrous construction. There are clay pots with many different shapes [1], Korean stone bowls [2], Indian copper cookware [3], Moroccan tagines [4], and many others.
My caveman traditional cooking requires a fire on the floor, or I do bbq and bury my food with coals. Modern cities are bad because I can't do that in my apartment.
Modern cities are bad because people like yourself agitate for legislation to infringe on my personal home life that has essentially zero externalities. We don't need to make cooking a political issue; it's such a stupid thing to create a wedge about. Just leave the gas stove owners alone for God's sake. Natural gas tax already exists for this purpose and some choose to pay the premium.
No one made that argument here. If you’re okay with the trade offs to air quality, go for it. I used to be, then I switched and realised induction really just is better at home
The other catch is actually subscribing to those phone lines (real POTS lines, not VOIP lines). Where I live, the only game in town is Bell Canada. The cost for a single home phone line is $58/month!
They do have enterprise accounts where I presume you'd be able to subscribe to 24 phone lines, but that would not be cheap! Whether they'd even allow you to bring 24 phone lines into a residential house is another question. They might not even have trunk capacity to offer you that many lines at your residence, so then you'd need to lease office space so they could bring in a T1 line.
Ahh I see. I guess I was mistaken about the title, which suggests building a real ISP for friends & family, rather than just a simulated ISP within a local network.
Because solar energy production doesn't just vary by time-of-day, it also varies seasonally. Where I live, winter solar production collapses due to decreased daylight hours and cloud cover. At the same time, energy use skyrockets due to heating demand.
We would need a lot of batteries to be able to charge during the summer and drain during the winter!
Because the sun doesn't shine every day. Where I live, the sky is overcast 90% of the time in the winter. You can't charge the batteries during the summer and run them all winter.
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