I am following the “off the thread” with JS by using Web Workers for a while now, and Dasurma is working hard for this.
The reason for this is that the “Next Bilion Users” and those in poverty will use low end devices. Currently I’m rewriting my Dapp W3bcollections.com from scratch without libs nor build only web components, I also started using web workers to load images for example and experiment with having the main thread for UI and using workers to do computations, looping, XHR, search, …
But to test this all I bought a Nokia banana which is a feature phone.
When loading the application of my current client which contains a lot of data, graphs and interactions I notice that it takes a while to load on the Nokia but it loads.
When I try to load my animal-kingdom Dapp it fails due to Blockstack.js and it times out. So this means that we are not reaching those people. Not only is creating a Blockstack account difficult with the management of the keys. Even if we deliver let’s say WebAuthn with Yubi keys they still can’t load it on the phones or notebooks they use.
I think Web 3.0 is not only what Blockstack stands for, Privacy, Data to the user, … . But also a new way of delivering software in the browser. Adding more JS to our apps to make them better is so ridiculous.
Anyway I only try to help the web and it’s users. Try to build JS lesser apps and start thinking about an architecture that is non-blocking the UI, that it’s not a power hog or data killer.
Here are some interesting articles and videos around the topic: