One of the issues is that many believe that the mobile web is a solved problem.
What the talk emphasizes is that the approach using the current set of JS frameworks on high spec phones over idealized networks is just miniaturizing desktop style approaches which is fundamentally at odds with the physics of the mobile web.
In the end a lot of energy is being poured into these faux solutions - energy that isn’t being spent on finding and shaping the real, long-term solutions.
The issue is that on average the cores are getting slower (extending battery life is another issue) - but there will be more cores. Browsers can make use of multiple cores:
We have started to do massive projects at every browser engine vendor to rewire the way we work to make sure that we can take advantage of all of those cores.
We parse your images off the main thread.
We do as much parsing of JavaScript and CSS and everything else as we can off the main thread.
But when it comes too actually running your script we still do most of it on the main thread 'cause that’s where you asked us to run it.
But the it’s-just-JavaScript attitude of the current generation of tools makes it difficult to take advantage of these advances - making it necessary to make the runtime environment more complex by introducing JavaScript-based SSR, yet another band-aid to cover up earlier sins. CSS and (initial) HTML (in the form of templates) should be ready to go at deployment time - not rendered from nothing at runtime, even if that is done on the server side.
I think this is just one example of certain people and organizations wanting to be on the Web because of the reach it currently has while at the same time being unwilling to understand the Web (and its constraints).
The facilities already exist to do the right thing - but in many cases people just can’t be bothered with these kind of details.
That is part of what Alex Russell calls the “privilege bubble” that many software developers experience.
A less inflammatory way of phrasing it is that one cannot assume that one’s own experience is representative. When making tools/products for others, one typically has to go out of one’s way to capture what experience is representative from the perspective of the prospective end user.
It’s the single page aspect of the SPA model that turned everything into a big ball of mud - it’s just another monolith.
SPA gave MPA a bad name. However designing a web application as set of pages, each with a highly focused responsibility and therefore a focused type of interactivity that may not need as much JS - at least not all in one place. Maybe if a page needs its own routing it is already doing too much.
Pages with focused responsibilities is where I see Service Worker API pointing to as the service worker can be automated to cache certain pages from the site on the device so that they are already available (the next time) even if the network is MIA.
I agree but as I stated elsewhere:
To my mind Svelte 3 is pointing in the right direction but as such is still flawed as it is an entirely JavaScript focused technology. The logical extension is a tool that outputs not just JavaScript but also platform independent templates for (initial) server rendered HTML and the supporting CSS.
That being said Rich Harris is a lot more knowledgable in the areas of visualzation and interactivity than most software (or web) developers - and I suspect that the most of the promising ideas will come from these kind of knowledge specialist turned developers rather than the “been there, done that - now how do I do the same thing over here” crowd.
It’s only alarmist for those people who still believe “the web is the future” come hell or high water and have a personal stake in it.
As long as the fate of the Web remains inherently coupled to the desktop mindset the truth may be closer to “this is as good as it gets - from now on things are only going to get worse”.
One of the issues is that most people in the industry primarily work with tools on desktop-like devices - so it’s only natural to have a desktop-centric mindset. It’s been well known that the desktop market has been stagnating and from a consumer perspective it’s turning toward a decline. Desktop devices are becoming less and less relevant to the average person.
Software developers will still use desktop-like devices as tools for some time to come but it wouldn’t surprise me if our “toys” are about to get more expensive again as the consumer market starts shrinking and more and more companies start to pull out of the desktop device market.
So the question is - will the decline of desktop take the Web with it?
Software developers need to be adaptable so one can always enter the market of native apps, backend whether it’s on-site or cloud; those opportunities aren’t going away any time soon and the Web will linger for some time to come - just like Cobol.
The reason why some people may seem alarmist is because whatever comes after the Web will likely not have the same reach as the Web has today - we’ll likely be thrown back to the much more insular communities that the Web has replaced.
There certainly is a sense of urgency because the Web is at an inflection point. There is a narrowing window of opportunity for the web to cross over to the new mobile user base but right now it looks like that opportunity is being squandered.
Despite the all time low web usage through mobile:
The same report also presents figures showing that it is much easier to reach a large audience on a mobile site than in a native app. There are close to 600 mobile web properties that reach audiences larger than 5 million visitors—nearly 4.5 times greater than the number of native apps with similar audiences. The top 1,000 mobile web properties have audiences that are almost 3 times the size of the top 1,000, apps and their audiences are growing twice as fast as native app audiences.
Majority of U.S. consumers still download zero apps per month, says comScore
i.e. there seems to be some end user resistance to store installed native apps (though once installed, they spend more time on them) - leveraging that resistance is the opportunity for the Web to transition to the mobile Web.
