(2021-08-20) Lie Tabs Killed The Web

lie says tabs killed the Web. Look to the past to know what the genesis did correctly, and find what modern web browsers are doing wrong.

Take a good look at it. Absorb it. Then take a good look at the image we opened with. "SimulBrowse." Can you find what the difference between the two is? The disastrous difference, not the beautiful imagery or the multilingual text.

The difference is tabs. Far beyond invasive marketing, "JavaScript," the absorption of data from nearly all humans for the ultimate goal of profit and unending surveillance, or anything else, what genuinely killed the World Wide Web was tabs.

Humans are incapable of true multi-tasking, and as a species we have trouble keeping much at all in our active memories

Modern Web browsers are designed to keep you from enjoying anything while also keeping you just distracted enough not to focus on anything important. Your pseudo-attention disorder was designed not by a scary social media corporation, but by a Web browser developer just trying to help you. Some of the worst evils are completely accidental.

Maya: I don’t agree that browser tabs killed the web, but I respect the chutzpah of the hypothesis. It’s rare to come across a take so truly contrarian. It’s rare for me to deploy that adjective as a compliment! And yet I find myself nodding, obama-not-bad-face, damn.