Why is the internet fragmented?
It used to be free and open
Can you remember the sound of the internet? The dialing, the grinding, the static. It was a process, a ritual. It was also a ritual to boot up your massive desktop computer, that was heating the whole room, whilst making tons of noises, and allowing everyone that was home to know what you were doing. Now that process is silent. It is pulling your phone out of your pocket or bag and tapping on the app in need. The ritual is gone. The internet and computers are ubiquitous and mundane. Our phones are our most used computer. It allows us to be connected to the internet at a moment's notice – no grinding, dialing, or static. But have you ever wondered why we are still forced to use our desktop computer when trying to do certain tasks? Why can’t we just use our phone? Why does the internet feel as accessible but as fragmented as ever?
To understand why this problem exists we need to cover a few topics – a short history of the internet, modern browsers, and modern app technologies. As a warning, this is going to get nerdy.
Most people don’t know how the modern computer was made, more importantly, when the worldwide web was invented. The internet as we know it, was a military project. Funded during the Cold War, called Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It was an agreed-upon protocol of moving packets of data to the US to troops overseas, military intelligence. It was and still is an amazing feat of technology, but it has been diluted by mobile tech and laziness.
Since the creation of the first iPhone in 2007 the internet has slowly shifted. Originally, it was designed for one device in mind – the traditional computer. Eventually, mobile-first experiences were built with the inception of the “App”. We as a people have spent the last 15 years optimizing a version of the internet for mobile. But we have done this by compressing the experience. We are provided with a watered-down version, forced to use an app, or forced to move to a traditional computer. Why can we not have the full-blown internet in our pockets? Why is it still a process to access the web, the way it’s intended?
In recent years, we as a people, think that faster is better – more than ever. When it comes to the makers in Silicon Valley, they believe this even more than most. This might be due to the crappy world of venture capital, but that’s a different letter. That means building software and web technologies that target certain platforms for certain things. Like the issues of Flash in the early 2000s, now we are building for browser types. Desktop vs mobile and desktop vs desktop. Mobile has the capabilities to do everything that desktop does, but it requires more work, more individual platform programming. Then, there is the war of the browser – Chromium vs everyone else.
Since most, if not all of the tools you use daily run in the browser, which runs on the internet, you might want to know more about the tech behind browsers. The most popular desktop browser in the world is Google Chrome. So inherently, it is the platform that more web developers target. It is built upon an open-source technology called Chromium. It is powerful and extensible, but only truly runs on a desktop computer. Apple has the most popular mobile browser in the world, Safari. It runs on a browser engine called WebKit. Then there is the outlier, Mozilla Firefox, which runs on the Quantum Browser Engine. To throw a wrench in it all, if you are using any browser on an iPhone/ iPad it still runs on WebKit, even if it is Chrome or Firefox. Each one of these browsers and the companies behind them will tell you that theirs is the best. Chrome is the most accepted, Safari is the safest, Firefox is a balance of speed and security.
Because we as a people like to take shortcuts, we must take them during app development too, right? We don’t take the time to develop bespoke, native code, for each platform – mobile and desktop. We barely make apps natively for the platform anymore, they just wrap those in Electron – another open-source tech stack built on Chromium + JavaScript. Electron apps are the power hungry, resource draining programs that make your Intel machines feel like a hot tray at a buffet. They are the apps on your phones that feel like a website but in an app form. They are nothing more than badly taken shortcuts.
So if the hardware is great, the browsers are fast and secure, and the delivery protocol is rock solid, why can we not use the full version of Google Docs on our phones the same way we do on desktop? Why do some websites show the submit button on Chrome, but not Safari? Why must we go back home, cutting your dog's walk short to sign a special form? Because the internet is broken, it is competing with itself – due to software companies trying to optimize it to death. The internet is made to move data. The devices are made to access data. We as people should not be restricted to how we get this data to our eyes.
As much as I miss the days of the early internet – the sound of it, the heat that it produced, I hope for a day that the internet is not being stifled by the competitive landscape. It exists for the point of access. We should be allowed to access it, and all its glory, even with the device in our pockets.