Notices by Alex Russell (slightlyoff@toot.cafe), page 2

@seldo But at a larger level, which Laurie helpfully frames, this *is* about total addressable market tradeoffs and the extent to which they are optimal.

I sense that a large delta in our perspectives comes from the respective ways in which we spend time. More than 30% of my time over the past 8 years (and > 50% of it now) has been doing direct consulting with teams like the ones that build the apps he mentions.

I'm living in the trough of disillusionment, which generates a bias.

@seldo One developer shared with me that an experiment demonstrated that every KB of JS on their mid-market e-commerce SPA cost them ~$700/K yr in revenue.

Outside the excesses of the Bay Area (which they and their customers assuredly are), there's literally no business argument for the MANY hundreds of KB of JS they were sending.

Yet another team at work staring down months of remediation thanks to "modern frontend" has caused me to write down why I've been *intensely* frustrated with the clearly broken market for web technology over our long lost decade:

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

Thanks to @brucelawson, @heydon, Taylor Hunt, @andy, and @phae for spotting errors in (even more splenetic) drafts.

@ocdtrekkie @alcinnz @chriscoyier: this is both ignorant of how standards are developed, and misreads how Apple has weaponised disinvestment to slow progress in standards and make new features "non-standard" by denying their own involvement in the process.

@ocdtrekkie @alcinnz @chriscoyier but that's besides the point: you've fingered the wrong party as being guilty for requiring a more capable engine. Apple is the one responsible for not keeping the pace, backing developers into the shitty position of having to ask you to use something else (which I promise they don't want to do)

@alcinnz @ocdtrekkie @chriscoyier nobody floating the klein-bottle theory that Safari sucking is good for the web seems bothered that Safari has caught up a lot in the last 18 months. Why is that?

@alcinnz @ocdtrekkie @chriscoyier the money would be the same (search share == $$$), and so *current* intensity to prompt for users to switch should be near 100% of potential prompting, modulo legit API differences that Apple currently externalises costs to developers for.

Is that big? Compared with the money *already* at stake? No.

So why is this potential future different? What's the mechanism of action? And why won't Safari be able to keep pace?

@alcinnz @ocdtrekkie @chriscoyier I tried to get into it here:

https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-browser-engine-choice/#%22webkit-couldn't-compete-if-it-had-to.%22

At a minimum, any future state claim must contend with the *current* ability of other browsers/sites to cajole users to switch browser on iOS and the huge money that *already* sits behind that choice.

Why is this new future materially different?

@alcinnz @ocdtrekkie @chriscoyier: the mechanism of action in this thought experiment is, at best, unclear.

@ocdtrekkie @chriscoyier

That's not a network effect. Literally, not what a network effect is/does or how it works. There's a literature on this and words have meaning.

Putting aside the fact that people *do* switch for security, the phrase you're looking for is perhaps "self-preferencing" or "related party activities", but more likely "competition".

Sites asking users to adopt better engines is not _prima facie_ bad, tho depending on context, can be. But also, how competition functions.

@ocdtrekkie @chriscoyier counterpoint: all of the research that causes browser teams to invest super heavily in security. E.g., Project Zero came out of the Chrome team.

When your product loses a reputation for good security, uses flee, and specifically the largest deployers (enterprises).

So at the risk of being quarrelsome, I humbly suggest that what you think of as "nobody doing that" is, in fact, central to the way browsers are built and adopted.

@chriscoyier As someone that has worked on browsers for a minute now, I can tell you that "no incentive" is heavily influenced by capacity, and when you're as rich as Apple, capacity is a choice about values:

https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-browser-engine-choice/

Apple does not *value* a free, open, interoperable, and vibrant web. Apple doesn't value having Mozilla in the world. It doesn't value a bigger and brighter future for the web. This is bad!

This post by @chriscoyier is the most generous case (to Apple) regarding the boot that Cupertino has been stamping on the web's face for a decade.

https://chriscoyier.net/2023/01/16/chokepoint/

What Chris identifies as "no incentive" to allowing alternative browsers is indistinguishable in practice from late-stage monopoly: when you've extinguished competition and reconfigured the world assuming it doesn't exist, it sure looks like a lot of work to allow it.

It's possible to believe both that nobody goes into frontend to deliver bad experiences to most users, and the privilege bubble has created a toxic miasma of ignorance and self-congratulation that ensures most new hires know only tools that set them up to fail most users.