@daringfireball Does this go in supercycles? I believe it was actually worse in the early-2000s with pop-ups. Then we all got Chrome*, and all the other browsers followed suit with some sane browser-wide policies. Then enshittification...

*I could be garbling the browser history details

@daringfireball I got fireballed twice in two days! 😭

But seriously, thank you for sharing my article and moving the conversation forward 🙏

@daringfireball It’s interesting to imagine how the consumer-grade Internet would have evolved without a scripting language in general-purpose web browsers.

Dynamic content delivered over the web can be a good thing. And, dare I say, inevitable. If we weren’t using our browsers for it, how would it work? Would every web app be something like a self-contained Hypercard stack?

As always, the devil’s in the details. HTML is a very democratizing medium. Javascript is less so, but it is still accessible if you put in the work. Would a world of standalone web-connected runtimes be similarly accessible? Would it be a security nightmare (a bunch of packaged Flash apps)? It’s an open question whether we’d want to trade the world we’ve got for that one.