Re: A phone that's just a web browser

In response to this post:

gemini://november.smol.pub/cursed-tech-thought

Such a thing did exist, of course. It was called Firefox Phone, and it ran Firefox OS (originally called Boot-to-Gecko):

gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/view?Firefox+OS

Before that there was also WebOS, although I don't know too much about that. Back then you could still run a web browser on low-end hardware. I don't recall it having the "killer feature" idea of the above post of being able to sync the phone and desktop seamlessly, but it certainly had the web-based apps including dialer, calculator, calendar, etc. Heck I even wrote an HTML app for the phone to import my contacts from vCards. I still have my original Geeksphone Peak Firefox Phone, although the battery is quite swollen.

The problem with this idea is that the browser is a constantly moving target. Over the years the browser has become quite an inefficient way to build apps, although it has simultaneously become a popular way to build apps (see Electron). If you think Java is bloated and uses up too much RAM, try comparing the resource usage of a native app to the amount of RAM and CPU a comparable web-based app or Electron app uses! As a simple experiment, I compared VSCode (which many would consider lightweight-and-fast for an Electron app) with a python plugin, to [vim] + [CoC] + [python plugin], and the difference was huge in both startup time and memory usage - VSCode used around 500Mb more RAM for similar feature set and was much slower to start up.

The web has also become quite commercialized, where users are now consuming content mostly through the browser. This has in turn forced the browser to implement anti-features like DRM, because very few people will choose to use a browser that doesn't support Netflix, over one that does. This isn't necessarily a problem by itself, but as I found out, the DRM is a binary blob with very little incentive to optimize performance especially on niche platforms like the Raspberry Pi, or an Impractical phone. Just look at the state of web browsers on the fairly popular Raspberry Pi, and you'll see the problem: hardware acceleration constantly breaks and is not optimized (on a Pi 4, 360p video in the browser takes 50% CPu, but in mpv takes less than 5%), and services like F1TV or Netflix will force you to upgrade to the latest version of the brwoser (which may not even be available for the Pi). I am ranting a little because this weekend F1TV implemented DRM and I could no longer watch it on my Pi-connected TV.

So to sum up, having a phone boot into a browser is bad because there is no incentive for Big Browser to support it or optimize for it, so it will run really slow and you'll need to keep upgrading the hardware of your Impractical phone every year just to keep it usable. Not to mention the dismal battery life and performance you'll get out of it, which can be problematic when you need to make an emergency call...

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