Which project will become the next web? (ie, replacing http/html/js)
Basic
18
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2032
60%
The web will not substantially improve before 2032
50%
There wont be one next web. Web browsers of the future will run many protocols, competently, which are fairly well integrated, and for which there is no obvious general purpose winner
34%
WeChat
32%
The current web will reform before a transition can occur
32%
Something from Epic Games
31%
roblox
31%
Playbit
31%
Fuchsia OS
31%
Horizon Worlds
27%
Appflowy
27%
Orca Sandbox or something derived from it
27%
Ad4m
27%
Brave Browser
24%
Flutter
24%
Replit
20%
The Zed editor
20%
emacs
19%
Anytype
17%
Agregore Browser
10%
VRChat

The web is the dominant protocol for social computing. It's possible that the future's web will not have continuity with the web browsers of today. If the present batch of web browsers are deposed, which project will the deposer emerge from?

Definition: A "next web" has arrived when a browser with a new rendering engine for a new site format becomes popular (adoption from 30% of people) while lacking tight integration with a fully webkit-compatible HTML renderer. It may (and probably should) be able to visit or embed traditional web pages, but these pages lack most of the above features, and most of the pages people actively use are in a new format.

Background: The current web has fundamental issues. The most obvious one is that it's absolutely attached to the DOM, which is slow (still can't animate certain things, and imo is most of the reason google wave was miserable to use and died), extremely complex (there's basically only one implementation, at this point, Blink.), still lacks useful secure isolation between components (iframes are slow and constrained and component shadow doms don't currently seem to be attempting security at all. This prevents some pretty important kinds of user-extensibility). Currently dominant web browsers have many other weaknesses incidental to the central browser engine, lacking support for p2p protocols, having irritating constraints on their extensions APIs, still not quite having good support for shared local data. Everything is still oriented around HTTP and Javascript, which are not typed, while cross-language interfaces become increasingly feasible.

It's likely that this will resolve to just one of the options, but there are two ways we could get multiple resolutions:

  • Projects merging. EG, Notion, Logseq or workflowy (or even roamresearch) may well develop a flutter-based web page format, or the 2d components of whatever VR social environment becomes popular could use any of the other options.

  • The web may end up being torn into separate protocols that mostly don't talk to each other due to political interference. Suffering between China, the US, the EU, and their engineers.

Answers should name projects. I may resolve (new) answers that aren't projects to NO ๐Ÿ˜ˆ. If you want to see another non-project answer, ask first.

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Projects that I don't think are going to be it but which are worth documenting here:
- Seif (Crockford) (old, not very exciting by today's light, no news, but was an earnest attempt by a famous web tech writer to get a lot of foundational stuff fixed)

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