Conversation

hate being in a situation where i mostly agree with the people who say software got very bloated, but also have to remind them that a lot of things have changed that do require today's level of complexity

like unicode being normalized, and now every OS has to know how to render all sorts of scripts of different complexity

or that desktop displays other than 96 dpi are a thing (which is part of the reason why all user interfaces now use flat icons and such)

or security (a web browser from the 90s would be unable to do HTTPS, and would not isolate 3rd-party cookies and such that weren't a problem back then, but would be a big issue now)

also, it sucks that so many "cross-platform" apps are now just web apps running in electron, but that's better than having them be native apps that only run on windows (or sometimes also macOS)

and i'd say today's HTML5/JS-based web apps are still an improvement over what we had before, which, i should remind you all, was shockwave/macromedia/adobe flash (and it was an even less pleasant experience on linux)