The Web Is More Than Enough

Last week was fun. We launched tinylittleoffice.com—you heard it here first!—and it turned out that lots of folks were in the market for an “office suite that stores data in the URL.” 

So many people visited that the server went down (well, I maxxed out the CloudFlare free plan), and ultimately, after I put in my credit card, a couple hundred thousand people came by to check it out. People on Hacker News insisted it was a pointless waste of time, and folks on GitHub started asking for features and fixes, all of which we’re considering, and some of which we’re doing. The Register wrote an article about it, and it also made it, for a little while, to the top ten of Product Hunt.

So all good; we will continue to support and enhance it, bit by bit, while we also do stable software development work for our customers and clients. But I did want to pause for a second and point out something that surprised me about the process. It’s this:

The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for building applications.

I know that is obvious and is the sort of thing I could have said any time in the last 20 years. But now there’s an addendum to the statement: 

The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.

I put maybe twice as much effort into building a web-based office suite as I might normally put into writing a long newsletter post. I’m not telling you this because I am a very special boy. I’m telling you because if you want to, you can learn to do it, too.

Fast, cheap, good, right? But even after I had to put in my credit card, CloudFlare hosting costs…$0. Partly because I optimize for cheapness, but partly because that’s just how it goes these days. Fast? Dear God, computers are fast, and software development is also fast compared to the past. But as I code web apps, I keep finding new corners of the browser I didn’t know well. Things are just…wild in there.

• The Web Crypto API is a first-class security platform in the browser.
• The Web Assembly platform lets you run native-speed code in your browser.
• WebGL provides for high-quality 3D and 2D graphics in your browser.
• The Web Audio API lets you mix sound in your browser.

And on and on. The web is really the greatest distribution platform imaginable right now. It’s inherently multilingual—I released TinyLittleOffice in 21 languages (the most common NYC ones, which is why it has Creole and Yiddish), with lots of infrastructure for accessibility. Plus, of course, JavaScript is a full-featured programming language, and HTML can represent most things a document can do on a computer; if you need something more old-school, PDF.js lets you deal with PDFs in the browser. I think you can even hyphenate text reliably these days, although I refuse to believe it.

I knew these things existed. I’d even programmed with them. But I’d never really looked closely; I just downloaded whatever open-source code would make it easier to build and tried to drag software across the finish line.

My quirky 1990s-vintage office suite might not convince you—it’s weird and small. So take a look at Simon Willison’s new web-based browser 3D game, Battle Drones. He’s hosting it on GitHub. He wrote it himself. He’s not a games builder. It just pops right up in the browser and you play it. It’s multiplayer, and it works offline.

As he wrote about it:

… but I can now see a path to vibe coded games like this being taken seriously. Battle Drones is fun, it looks good, it has innovative features (the multiplayer-over-audio thing is a first for an RTS as far as I can tell). I’d love to see what someone with better taste than me and a driving passion to produce something truly exceptional could build!

All the various cool browser technologies have been around for years. But they are each extremely vast. If you get good at Web Audio, you probably don’t have time to get good at Web Crypto and Web Assembly and WebGL. 

The reason they were so complex is, basically, because they were built for teams like those at Google, not for individuals. In the past, the web was for people to build web pages—and, yes, in the present, you can still do that, but for more than a decade, the web has been designed for giant companies so they can deliver software securely to billions of people who buy things with credit cards. These huge mega-libraries were dropped into the web browser to enable large teams to build big things, and the little guy was a bit of an afterthought. But now you can make a game in 3D with sound, and it can work just fine on a plane.

This is one of the places where “are we in an AI bubble” gets fuzzy for me, because it’s totally clear all these giant AI companies are huffing AGI paint fumes, but at the same time, if we actually unlocked the economic transformation of, say, 100 times as many people making software for each other, that would blow an enormous crater into the current tech economy. Don’t like the way your giant industrial looms make carpet? Hack your own firmware and make each carpet totally personalized! Turn any Instagram post into a huge floor covering! Suddenly all the carpet companies have to hack their own firmware to compete. What’s that going to be like? 

This also destabilizes the app store economy. The high tax of building for app stores seems less worth paying when you can just test an idea in the world from a web server for $0 after a couple weeks. Perhaps Mozilla should take another swing at launching a mobile phone! (Forget I mentioned that.) In any case, what used to be a large industrial process is now a personal one, if you so desire. Web browsers enable incredibly rich app development—and that’s radically easier than it used to be.

It’s a mixed blessing. I’ve been a writer for years, and software development feels more and more like writing to me every passing week. The awkward part of the comparison is, in general, people do not want to pay writers any money at all. As a writer, you get used to it. But for software people, being perpetually devalued is pretty novel. Then again, if you need software to do something—like our clients!—say, to fix a process, organize a database, get more value out of a big piece of industrial equipment, it’s a pretty amazing time, because you can do just about anything. I’m pretty confident we’ll all meet in the middle, but it’ll take a while, and it will be different on the other side.