I'm currently putting what little few hours I have into a few side projects that touch things like XM/MOD and other things like ANSI, RIP, etc. I always seem to share Jason's nostalgia and I get his meaning, but I often don't see eye to eye with him on a lot, whether his treatment of BBSs or some things like emulation.

There are so many red flags here, from licensing to browser vendors to JavaScript to threading to security, I don't know where to begin. It's not that these things aren't doable (even stupid hacks like transcoding are readily doable), it is just that I do not agree with the notion that this must be in the browser for the sake of digital preservation or some sort of user experience.

I know this is a very unpopular opinion in some parts (perhaps HN), but why must everything be in JavaScript and in the web browser? I understand we want things to be cross-platform and network accessible, but I must say that the drift from native to the browser is becoming increasingly disheartening and inspiring constant wtf moments. I get that a lot of people use the web and some people even see it as the computer itself now, but we rarely pause to ask if this is a good thing. Moreover, we invest a lot of time and effort in things that aren't really worth it in the end. I wish in computer science there were more sanity checks and willingness to make progress, rather than to paint flat tires or more crudely, shine turds. The term sunk costs comes to mind.

I like the web and the browser as much as the next person for browsing web pages, but it is not an operating system. Stop making it do everything and anything; that's why I bought a computer not a web browser machine (yeah, I know chromeos). I did not buy my computer so I could stab a few of its cores in the face or make it feel like it is running several orders of magnitude under-clocked. I feel like this is what my browser is doing to me when I see <insert latest abuse> or visit a page displaying a few poorly aligned paragraphs of text resulting in more RAM usage than total RAM I had in my computer for several decades.

What are the benefits and do they really outweigh the costs? I understand that building binaries is full of issues, as is compilation, processor architecture, and so many other parts of the native experience. But the thing is we spend so much time on maintaining and improving our already dated and flawed OSs that at least generally run fast and sanely.

Why would we want to shoehorn yet more things we already do happily in our OS into the browser? Why move something from efficient environments to inefficient ones? Why have to lobby or wait on a standards committee to allow something? Why wait on browser vendors to agree or disagree to make it more complicated? Why am I trading taskbars, terminal sessions, or other OS constructs for browser tabs (can we have new or other ways to mix content types)? How is the browser better as a unifying experience than my OS? Do I really even want videos on web pages or do I want something that is built better for video content? Why not just use what's inside my computer, like that expensive GPU, CPU, RAM, etc. without some ridiculous workarounds or barriers? These are all just random topics to think about, however the point is that it has to be more than, "Wow, that was cool but stupid" moments or "it's in the browser."

We already have put herculean efforts into making safe, pleasant, efficient, cross-platform languages. There are many successes and failures, and the jury is almost universally still out. But the barriers there are much smaller and the environments much more sane. In light of the move to multi-core architectures and bumping up against x86 limitations/physics, and eventually the same for others, it seems insane to me to throw away what we do have right now and relegate it to some browser environment that often struggles to things I can easily do faster/smoother over a terminal session.

I feel with every new "XYZ, but in the browser" we are taking a step away from both the Internet and the general utility of the computer and stomping on what remains. Instead, if we want experiences that must use the Internet, I would like to see more lower-level things implemented. I want to see the next browser, the next usenet, something new that can be built-on and other higher-level things for the every day user. One day it is mobile apps, the next day browser apps, and so on. Let's forget what is trendy or fun and get back to being creative and making progress, leaving the rest to fun "because" side-projects.

Finally, getting back to what Jason and/or archive does specifically, how does this help preservation? It seems to me that browser vendors and browsers in general don't have the best track record in general here and are an added layer of complication vs. <insert OS/programming language/VM/runtime/shim/emulator>. We've also seen any kind of ancillary/hosted/browser-native solution come and go, whether it was applets, flash, activex, whatever. I wish the browser were better with video, but VLC is not what would make it better, just designing and allowing the proper support from the ground-up would be the right way, and at worst, requires the help of the committees and the vendors. I do love VLC.