this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Do you mean if it started with apps right away instead, or how do you mean?
Not necessarily, but yes. I didn't fill in a lot of detail for my question, but my question goes something like this in depth:
The software ecosystem is a mess right now, not just OS, but drivers, web, GUI, there's some problems here and there, and thankfully, there's also workarounds, and then there's also this saying: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". But that being said, stuff like these add to the technical debt, and perhaps in the future, it could implode, just like Y2K.
Of that, if we were to just cherry-pick web stuff, there's a whole lot of conflicting standards, there's different engines, transpilers, libraries, web frameworks, API, protocol standards, limited localization, poor accessibility, etc.
I was wondering - what if hypothetically, a small variable were to be introduced in the timeline that prevents the existence of browser and JavaScript in general? Would there have been the growth of apps and applets, that could have successfully used the internet? Perhaps the HTTPS would have never existed, because of the death of HTTP, maybe we would be using a Gopher equivalent of a browser? Maybe we could have seen solutions like Gemini and Yggdrasil? Could it have killed TCP/IP and we could have seen RINA? Would we have seen some sort of standardization? Or perhaps, would we have ended up with a population who were computer-literate and appreciated the power-user side of operating systems, like terminal browsers? Perhaps, it could have created a standardized internet experience? Maybe it could have improved accessibility? Then, what about the execution of code in general? Would we be downloading binaries, instead of loading webpages? How would it have been sand-boxed? Questions like that.
My guess is that if browsers as we know them weren't invented, HyperCard would've become the first browser eventually. No idea where things would progress from there or if it'd have been better or worse than the current clusterfuck. Maybe we'd all be talking about our "web stacks" instead of websites, and have various punny tools like "pile" and "chimney" and "staplr". Perhaps PowerPoint would've turned into a browser to compete with it.
If browsers were invented but JavaScript specifically was not, we'd probably all be programming sites in some VB variant like VBScript (although it might be called something different).