[Affric]

Good comment. And the old web is still there but for almost 30 years it’s not been where the growth is.

99% of people don’t want computers, they want computers to do the work of life for them so they can get on with what really interest them.

[nunez]

thanks! agreed.

browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on.

that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it!

sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge.

The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would. And that is happening now that iDevices are becoming significantly more capable and microsoft seems to be throwing less weight at moving Windows licenses.

alas, if this is true, it makes so much more sense to throw significant resources at making phones and tablets the best they can be instead of shoehorning a dying desktop experience into a mobile factor (something that's been tried way too many times before)

[superkuh]

>browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0

For now. It won't be too many years before the mega-corp browsers not only drop early HTTP support but they drop HTTP/1.1 too. They'll do this in the name of "security". And then all that Chrome based browsers will support will be their very own invented and open-washed QUIC in the form of HTTP/3 and hosting a personal website visitable by a random person will not be possible without continued permission from an incorporated entity. HTTP/3 implementations by Google so far have made it so that Chrome CANNOT establish a connection without a proper certificate authority based TLS certificate. I give this change about 3 years.

You can argue that you can always get a CA TLS cert from another entity if, say, the incredible centralization of all the personal web into LetsEncrypt somehow goes bad. True enough, but if the pressure group can pressure LE it can probably pressure $otherCA too. And frankly, having to get the continued approval of any incorporated entity to host a website is just not acceptable. LE is currently a benign overlord for good on the web. So was dot Org for many years. But if it's made valuable enough the pressure and corruption will come.

[nunez]

this is exactly what's happening and it can be concerning, but from reading the http/3 spec, i think the changes make a lot of sense.

http/3 is multiplex by default, which lends itself much better to RPC (love it or hate it), and is designed to perform much better over choppy network connections (cellular).

also there is really no good reason to not be on https these days. first, chrome uses system certificate trust stores, and OSes still ship with a healthy set of root CAs. second, LE is only popular because creating certs with literally anyone else (except the cloud providers) is expensive and a huge pain in the ass...but you can still get your own shiny cert issued by DigiCert or whomever. third, every web server has made enabling https on vhosts really easy and almost all servers run on CPUs which do hw-accelerated crypto, so performance hits are negligible these days. fourth, i would personally much rather get a SSL warning when the site I'm visiting isn't who they say they are than get a site that's modified in transit silently without me knowing.

the only thing i use http for these days are super simple local dev sites or for my dummy page for detecting captive portals.

the change that really worries me is chrome going all in on neutering adblockers through manifest v3. that feels hugely anti-consumer to me.

[superkuh]

You're missing out on the fact that the de-facto standard which is disappearing is HTTP+HTTPS. Not one or the other. Together they provide security and choice. This is what I hope we all chose to continue supporting. I am not anti-TLS. I'm not even anti-CA TLS. I just think HTTP should be an option.

The only situations where HTTP has reason to be removed entirely are government/corporate/institutional sites with a genuine risk of MITM attacks on login/etc processes. For normal websites (ie, not web applications with accounts) created by humans this makes about as much sense as wearing a bullet proof vest while on the phone; yeah, you're more secure but... it's not actually helping.

[Eupraxias]

Why is this getting downvoted? Can someone who is downvoting, or anyone, provide a reason?

Is the comment patently incorrect?

[Karrot_Kream]

Is a proof-less conspiracy statement supposed to be enjoyed and loved? It's more conspiratorial emotion than fact. These "I miss the old internet" posts come up every week or so on HN and are largely all the same conspiracies with slightly different wording and no more proof than before.

[Eupraxias]

Fair enough - I hadn't considered that the implication was it would take a conspiracy to do it.

[randac]

Welcome to hn in recent years.

The site desperately needs some form of meta moderation.. I've barely scrolled this thread and seen multiple examples already.

[wintermutestwin]

> The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would.

Count me out of this brave new world of tiny screens and crappy UI/UX.

[knome]

I wish I could ignore it. It seems many web designers, even at major companies, don't consider PCs anymore.

Google's new carousel features aren't proper links and don't respond to middle-clicks. If you want to pop out an image into its own tab you have to first click it, then pop it out from their more-info panel.

Azure has similar problems, where listings collapse to nigh unusable sizes on desktop and Ctrl-f is broken horribly since many of their page switches actually just slide the current page to the left while keeping it loaded, so that when you go to search, the interface starts dragging back to hits on the previous page. Not that Ctrl-f really works in the face of the "only load just enough of the content that fits into the undersized box" anyway.

They'll push megabytes of javascript to avoid server-side rendering kilobytes of source, making the whole thing harder to use than it needs to be.

[mdbauman]

I highly doubt the phone and PC markets will converge any time soon.

Apple has made seemingly made the most progress toward this and it isn't hard to imagine someone plugging their iPhone in to a screen when they arrive at work and resuming their Excel spreadsheet with the connected keyboard, no different than the company-issued laptop today. But I don't see what incentive Apple has to make that a reality when they can keep selling people two separate $1000+ devices.

Edit: I would love to be proven wrong, so any opinions/examples to the contrary are very welcome.

[thesuitonym]

Using tablets or phones doesn't necessarily mean tiny screens--although for the life of me, I can't understand why so few companies have put effort into making a phone with a UI that scales for regular screens. (I know they exist, don't sent me examples, thee point is that there are so few of them."

[metadat]

Samsung DEX.

[ghastmaster]

That is innovation! I like scrcpy for controlling the phone from my desktop.

[rchaud]

I got a Galaxy Fold and it's remarkable how much more 'active' work I'm doing on my phone now that I can switch to iPad Mini-sized dimensions and it still fits in the palm of my hand. The narrow screens that 99% of phone users have seem to adversely incentivize shallow, consumption-oriented usage in my case.

[ako]

With iPadOS 16.2 you’ll be able to connect your M1/M2 iPad to a big monitor via usb-c, use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and it’ll be just like using a laptop.

[wintermutestwin]

Yeah, except I can't run uBlock Origin, which makes an iPad a nonstarter for me.

[deafpolygon]

Because of the sweet, sweet advertising dollars.

[nunez]

tbf, a lot of sites i use these days have apps that are better than their web sites from a UX perspective, and the iPad Pro 12.9 I just got has an unbelievably color-accurate XDR display that bests the MacBook Pro 13 I'm trading in for it.

[fragmede]

Desktop not a dying product anymore than cars are a dying product. They are undergoing changes (ICE to EV) and there are alternatives (trains) but they're simply not going away. Desktop OS is for creating digital things. Phones are the way to digitize things that have been created outside of the computer. Phones don't have dual 24" monitors. Dual 24" monitors don't fit in your pocket. Different use cases, with a lot of gray area in between.

[ako]

You’ll be able to connect you’re mobile devices to large screens soon, see the M1/M2 iPads. A lot of professional content creation is already moving to mobile devices like music, 3D design, writing, painting, video shooting and editing, photo shooting and editing. Other professions are also using mobile devices for professional work like inspections, pilots, medical doctors, etc, etc. Soon (already?) more professional work will be done on mobile devices rather than on desktops.

[Eupraxias]

And then there are those of us who positively REVILE the mobile interface. I will continue to use a non-laptop desktop computer until I have no choice.

For me, I turn my telephone on for 2FA challenges, and then turn it off again. I hate those things.

[deafpolygon]

> i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge.

They will never converge because keeping 100% control over their walled garden is too profitable. Apple makes too much money off tablets and phones through app sales, subscription, control over advertising, etc.

[ekanes]

Agreed. Was quite surprised when my daughter was doing grade 8 math homework on her phone. Would never have occurred to me to try, let alone want to!

[lakomen]

Did AI write this?