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JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) - Jono Alderson
(www.jonoalderson.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Client-side scripting is a hack. HTML didn't have all the tags people wanted or needed, so instead of carefully updating it to include new features, they demanded that browsers just execute arbitrary code on the user's computer, and with that comes security vulnerabilities, excessive bandwidth use and a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.
Totally an accident by the way! They weren't trying to become a monopoly, promise!
Netscape? I don't think it worked out for them, if that was the case :D
Developers wanted to build and deploy apps to end user machines. The round trip for page loads was lousy for usability.
Java applets were too shitty. Flash was too janky and hard to work with. So Mozilla started adding JavaScript as a hack. It filled a need.
It definitely adds a barrier to entry, but JavaScript was really perfected in chromium, which is a different codebase from the folks who proposed and built js to begin with.
I'm not saying JavaScript is good, but it fills a need.
Wanted, maybe, but needed? It even had marquee, what else could anyone need?