[s5806533]

Did ddevault specifically say that Gemini should be regarded as a replacement for the web? I never read him that way. As far as I can tell, people are constantly stressing the converse, namely that Gemini is not supposed to be the next web. It's even in the FAQ [1] -- if that's not part of the "marketing material", then I don't know what is. It would be very kind if you could provide specific citations to substantiate your claim about Gemini marketing.

[1] see 1.6 in https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi

[throw10920]

Right in that FAQ is the phrase "You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right back to its essence"". To a technical person, "foo, stripped right down to its essence" means that this thing is directly competing with foo - or, at the very least, that it exists in the same realm as foo. Gemini does not exist in the same realm as the web, nor is it at all similar to "the web, stripped right back to its essence".

The fact that occasionally fans might disclaim that it's only meant to replace "part of" the web is materially irrelevant - Gemini isn't capable of replacing any nontrivial fraction of it. (its fans claim it is, though - "I want to discard the parts of the web that Gemini does better, and explore other solutions for anything that’s left of the web which is worth keeping (hint: much of it is not).")[1]

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.htm...

[s5806533]

I will concede that Gemini folk sometimes have a rather narrow definition of what the "essence" of the web is, namely, that the web is basically just a medium for hypertext. In the early days of Tim Berners-Lee this was true, though. And I still think that hypertext (as opposed to "web applications") represents a nontrivial fraction of the web (see Wikipedia and, to a lesser degree, blogs).

Drew Devault makes a very valid point: that the web today is at the mercy of Google, because it depends on browser technology that has become so complex that only Google (and maybe a foundation entirely dependent on Google) can deliver it. An ad company! So we (as humanity) have to find ways to replace the web, step by step. And Drew says it right there: "Gemini [...] addresses a subset of its use-cases better than the web does." And for the other use-cases (i.e., besides hypertext), other replacements have to be found.

So I still think that the marketing is way more nuanced than you are saying.

[krapp]

>Drew Devault makes a very valid point: that the web today is at the mercy of Google, because it depends on browser technology that has become so complex that only Google (and maybe a foundation entirely dependent on Google) can deliver it.

Except all of that browser technology is open source. So none of it is actually at the mercy of Google.

It's weird how a forum full of technologists, free software believers and millionaire entrepreneurs have decided that browser technology is so hard and complex that it would literally be more feasible to rebuild the entire web from scratch on completely different protocols, yet we'll have warp drives, self-driving cars and VR beamed directly into our brains by the end of the decade, and come hell or high water we'll put a blockchain on everything.

It's not that hard because it's actually that hard, it's that hard because we want an excuse to abandon the web and browsers as a lost cause, because we're tired of it and its normality, and would rather look for still-green pastures elsewhere.

[foxfluff]

> It's weird how a forum full of technologists, free software believers and millionaire entrepreneurs have decided that browser technology is so hard and complex that it would literally be more feasible to rebuild the entire web

Have you built a web browser? I have. It quickly became useless as the web moved on. I've also been involved in other web browser projects (including a small webkit based browser as well as Firefox).

My experience is that the web is 1) broken beyond repair 2) building a new browser is virtually impossible 3) for all the effort, building a good browser [such as one that pleases Gemini users] is literally impossible because the web standards themselves require you to implement hostile functionality without which your browser is broken and not actually a web browser, and with which you lose control and enable all kinds of malicious and user-hostile behavior.

Ostensibly open standards and open source technology does not help you when said technology enables the other end to run a bunch of code on your client, and decline service because it doesn't approve of your client.

Building a gemini client is actually very easy.

[krapp]

>My experience is that the web is 1) broken beyond repair 2) building a new browser is virtually impossible 3) for all the effort, building a good browser [such as one that pleases Gemini users] is literally impossible because the web standards themselves require you to implement hostile functionality without which your browser is broken and not actually a web browser, and with which you lose control and enable all kinds of malicious and user-hostile behavior.

Your first item has nothing to do with browsers, it's a purely subjective opinion (albeit one so strongly held by so many here I'm not going to bother trying to disabuse anyone of it anymore.)

Your second item implies that it's too difficult for a hobbyist to build a modern browser in their free time, but the unstated assumption that any new browser must be simple enough to be built by a single person, entirely from scratch, is an arbitrary technical limit based on political ideals. Obviously it isn't actually impossible and, given the number of Firefox forks in the wild, doesn't even require billions of dollars in resources.

And your final item dismisses the entire premise of modern browsers as user-hostile and "not actually web browsers." Which again, has nothing at all to do with the actual technical difficulty of browser implementation but is essentially a declaration that "it sucks any way so why bother?"

You're proving my point, as are the other commenters. This is obviously an argument driven primarily by emotion (disgust with the modern web and complexity) and politics (anti-capitalist and anti-corporatist sentiment) rather than fundamental technical limitations.

[foxfluff]

My first item has everything to do with the web technology, which browsers are intimately related to. Outdated and insecure firefox forks and their bitter users who complain about the web being broken when they browse it on their Firefox fork serve to prove the point more than to disprove it. And yes, the third point doesn't stop at merely claiming that the web is complex and hard; it just claims that even if you somehow manage to implement it all, you're still at the mercy of corporations because the very technology you implemented has built-in support for discrimination; Google, Cloudflare, et al can decide that they don't want your browser. It is broken technology and it should be thrown away.

[lmm]

Microsoft have literally abandoned maintaining their own browser engine. If staying independent of Google isn't affordable and worthwhile for them, who could it be affordable and worthwhile for?

[throw10920]

Microsoft abandoned their own browser engine for business reasons. I feel like it should be obvious that what's "worthwhile" for a for-profit organization is very, very different than what's "worthwhile" for a non-profit, individual, or group of open-source developers; "affordable" isn't even in the picture.

This line of reasoning is entirely invalid.

[lmm]

KDE have also abandoned writing their own browser engine. Mozilla continues to produce one but they continue to attract very few outside contributors and rely largely on Google for funding. If no-one's actually doing something we should be wary of blithely assuming that it would be esay or even possible.

[krapp]

Why do we have more than one fork of Linux? Why don't we all just admit that Ubuntu won and call it a day?

[lmm]

The fact that operating systems maintained by small organisations are more viable than web browsers maintained by small organisations should tell you something about the complexity of the web stack.

[s5806533]

Reading this whole thread again, I want to add the following: this whole matter of whether web browsers have become too complex or not is just a tangent. The main debate revolves around the question of whether the web is broken, whatever this means, and this question is not a technical one, but a matter of taste and political attitude. Which is to be expected, because the internet is a social thing. So let's agree to disagree, maybe, but let's stop arguing about tangents the way little internet trolls do.

[zepto]

Are you seriously making the claim that web browsers are not hard and complex to build?

Given that the source code is available, you might want to take a look. It may inform your answer.

[krapp]

> Are you seriously making the claim that web browsers are not hard and complex to build?

No, I'm making the claim that web browsers are hard and complex, but not impossible and that it's weird how the tech community seems to have decided that it's impossible because it isn't simple.

[foxfluff]

What is the point though? Yes, in theory it is possible to make yet another broken implementation of broken technology. Going all pedantic on Devault and armchairing "no but acshually" isn't really contributing to the discussion at all, nor does it undermine their argument.

[s5806533]

I don't get your polemics here. Where's the line between hard and impossible? It's no less impossible to build a web browser than it is to build pyramids, because both these things have been done before. But what does this mean? Why should we accept something that -- while theoretically not impossible -- is way harder and requires way more resources than necessary, and that is guided by the most pathological incentives (ad revenue)?