Response to Another Take

I Respond To Someone Else's Take

Well, there's a first time for everything, I suppose. But I read this article while doing research, and you know what? I felt like responding to it. So here it is.

This page was written by an "average developer," which is more than I can claim to be on the web development front. However, as someone who was tried multiple times to learn web development, and further as someone who has given up web development countless times because of javascript, I feel I can confirm many points the author makes.

Actually, I affirm most of the points they make; as many programming languages as there are for web dev, there aren't any good ones that aren't hacky getting to work. For as many of those languages are higher level, so much time is spent on writing things that are not the main functionality. Additionally, mostly everyone (except Google's pet Firefox users) is using the exact same web engine (Blink is the web engine behind Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and many others, and it makes up between 80-90% of web traffic) uses the same browser engine, and yet it's really difficult to make a single web app look good on all platforms.

There is one specific point they make, though, that I vehemently disagree with, that all browsers should auto-update by default. Now, I understand that Zach levels of paranoia are not exactly common among normal people, but there are some strong reasons to refuse this point.

Firstly, for those who don't know, an auto-update in any program is what security experts like to call a "backdoor," and these are notoriously hard to protect, especially as the one the user needs the most protection from is generally the providers. It is pretty commonplace for a corporation, say Apple, to decide that they need to make a major change to user's devices, let's say like downloading an AI (because those are world-reknown for their accuracy) to look through EVERY FILE ON THE USER'S DEVICE to look for something bad, let's say CSAM, without notifying the user. Of course, something like that would be a rediculous invasion of privacy that no one would ever do, right?

Let's give another hypothetical. Let's say another company, ASUS perhaps, implements an auto-update system in their computers, and they don't have the best security, so some hackers compromise the update server, and then, suddenly, everyone with an ASUS device has malware on their computer that is entirely not their fault (unless you say it's their fault they bought an ASUS device, in which case I would ask if you could take a look at my sister's iPhone).

Auto-updates are a neat trick if your users don't know any better (which, incidentally, is the only time it could be necessary, as these users probably don't update anything either), but for competent users, we typically don't update because we don't want to. I put off updating Librewolf for a couple weeks because I didn't want to deal with Firefox's new Proton UI (how about you make a faster browser engine instead, Mozilla?), and because I know how to mitigate security risks from my browsing I was ok.

If I see any form of auto-update in a program, I immediately reconsider using it. I have put a lot of work into making sure I control my computer and its software, and I won't give that up to just anyone (but especially not Mozilla, Google, or Microsoft.

Now, if you just read my response, you'll probably think that this was some major point in the article; and you'd be mistaken. It is a minor point in a list of suggestions to improve web development, basically all of the others I agreed with. But, this is the part I had the most to say about. So, there you go.


2021-08-08