What a week. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and many others had their big flagship events announcing the future of computing. Not surprisingly, it means shoe-horning AI into everything. This could mean that the web as we know it will go away. Already 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible and some people predict a grim future of an AI-run web called the "dead internet theory".
Somehow, this already happens. Google now follows Bing's strategy to not return links to web sites as the first results, but AI summaries. This doesn't go down well with everybody, especially as even those already show ad content. There is a trick to un-AI Google, though, by adding a ‘?udm=14` to the URL. You can automate this by changing your browser settings, as explained at Ten Blue Links.
Maybe we don't need to use everything, just because it is new. After all, all the big players also had some slip-ups lately:
GitHub's Enterprise Server has a flaw that allows authentication bypass. A Microsoft outage meant that Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT internet search were offline. Google Cloud wiped out a customer account and its backups. An undetected SSH backdoor infected 400k Linux servers for two years and Apple's iOS 17 has a bug that resurfaced deleted photos.
So, let's wait and see what will really make a difference for us, and focus on things we can use today. Google released a great new dashboard showing the status of the web, telling us what can safely be used. They also have a good summary about what's new in the web. And the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey is still open to make your voice heard. Also, you can help define what the future of CSS will look like.
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