Stop Pushing the Web Forward

An interesting read on the state of the web and how, just maybe, we should ponder slowing down for one second to consider the direction we’re headed in and contrast that with where and what we want the web to be. Of course to suggest “slowing down” is technological blasphemy. So the author correctly prefaces his article with “Fair warning. You’re going to hate this one.”

Here are a few passages I enjoyed, in no particular order:

Recently I’ve been having serious doubts about the whole push the web forward thing. Why should we push the web forward? And forward to what, exactly? Do we want the web to be at whatever we push it forward to? You never hear those questions.

Pushing the web forward currently means cramming in more copies of native functionality at breakneck speed — interesting stuff, mind you, but there’s just too much of it.

Native apps will always be much better at native than a browser. Instead, we should focus on the web’s strengths: simplicity, URLs and reach.

But why do web developers want navigation transitions? In order to emulate native apps, of course. To me, that’s not good enough.

We’re pushing the web forward to emulate native more and more, but we can’t out-native native. We are weighed down by the millstone of an ever-expanding set of tools that polyfill everything we don’t understand — and that’s most of a browser’s features nowadays. This is not the future that I want to push the web forward to.