Let the little guys in: A context sharing runtime for the personalised web

This post contains some interesting ideas and poses (or at least suggestively alludes to) a few thought-provoking questions but is weakened by spending too much of its word (and the author's thinking) budget on tangents about LLMs.

Side note: mashups and widget engines occupied a substantial part of technophiles' focus (incl. power users and programmers) 15–20 years ago. The W3C chartered a working group to investigate harmonizing different implementations. That interest eventually evaporated, and they all went away. It's almost eerie how rare it is to find any modern reference to something that consumed so much attention at the time. It'd be reasonable to wager that the majority of programmers under 25 have never even heard of Konfabulator or are aware of the hype that existed around other vendors' similar offerings.

I'm waiting for when a new browser maker comes along and gains market share by shaking up the conventional browser UI by offering stuff like a widget engine built into the browser and basic missing functionality like better UX around site logins (including its own native UI for ordinary (i.e. non-Cookie-based) HTTP auth), native support for dealing with tabular data (like sorting tables) and CSV, and of course direct authoring of Web resources—instead of offloading that to e.g. Google Docs and startups like Notion whose browser-based apps don't clearly separate the editor/tooling from the content, which in turns means it never really feels like first-class media that's really "of" the Web.

> You are not allowed to transmit or store my sensitive information anywhere (unless I give my consent).

The “unless I give my consent” part could be tricky; for a sufficiently big company it is relatively easy to guide, force or trick users into giving away their privacy.

Then again, perhaps this could be addressed on a technical level; e.g. somehow making it impossible for the app to distinguish between consent given and not.