You literally posted a "counterfactual" advocating doing nothing. How is that open & exploratory? How does that line up at all with anything I'd value? This sounds like The Enemy of Good talking.

This case isn't well made, except in it's crafty eloquent manipulation. It's bitter & pitch-axe raising about two pretty minor potentially breaking changes. Mountains out of mole hills. There's definitely very very very good reason for one of them, to protect users from some really ugly & janky manipulation (alert()... c'mon). The other I understand less. This actual evidence (someone actually bothered finding some for once, at least) is a small section in the middle.

> "But why is Google breaking the web forward at such a pace?"

> With Google’s move-fast-break-absofuckinglutely-everything axiom in mind,

The majority of the article is elaborate framing to make us feel bad, to manipulate us towards hatred & distrust & suspicion. Through elaborate historical analogy. But these two little specs of evidence... they're like 0.00000000000001% of the web platform. It's ridiculously overblown. Get real, show some sense of scope; this is yellow dog journalism, sensationalism & creating rabidness. Civil society needs defenses against this would-be scandal-mongering. Against this ego, this control freaking:

> Ages ago I argued we should give up on this, but of course no one listened.

The article's conclusion is horriying. Taking a snapshot of the web, freezeframing it now, and refusing to grow the platform is death. Should we do the same for iOS? Sorry, you need to put it on hold for a decade. Your priests are too uppity Apple, you need to not alter your shit anymore.

I do think the web has a much higher calling & standard than the lowly proprietary platforms. But I see very very few things that I think have been bad. People just protest change itself- they have little specifically to cite or dislike- & have staid desires, locked down & emotional responses. They want to shoehorn things into what they know. Being unwilling to accept change, demanding a hypermedium restrict itself to small ambitions is such a ridiculous & absurd conservative propoganda system. And it's one propogated by people, who, more often than not have other dogs they want to win the race.

> Shall we push the web forward until it’s broken,

The evidence of breakage is so vanishingly slim. There is so much hype, so much fear, so much hate against the web, against it's growth. But there's so little evidence. The author chalks this up to self-selection of communities, but don't you think there'd be like, you know, some actual evidence of the web actually breaking by now? Where is the walls of flame? Where is the horrible end of days we've been undergoing since this horrible apocalypse has not been abated? Where are the sites we use & love that just dont work anymore?

Being afraid of the web having utility, being a dynamic medium, is such a foolish Fear Uncertainty Doubt cavalcade. No other medium has ever been so widely, so roundly kept down, by such hostile & pointless griping. And the anti-web forces are backed by an immovable object against which no progress can be made: the tyrannical Apple app store, the scummiest most loserly & unreasonable & staunchly unmovable obstructions of unfair anti-competition hacks.