101–110 of 777 posts
On the one hand, you can say “look, an Electron app that’s actually fast!”
On the other hand, you can say “wow web apps are slow; it takes ~50x longer to render a basic list than to regex search across tens of thousands of strings”.
From a performance perspective, the JS part of the stack certainly isn’t helping.
0: https://keminglabs.com/blog/building-a-fast-electron-app-wit...
I prefer well-designed desktop applications to web applications for most things that don't naturally involve the web: * Email clients (I use Thunderbird) * Office suites * Music and media players * Maps * Information managers (e.g., password managers) * Development tools * Personal productivity tools (e.g., to-do lists) * Games As Windows starts on-boarding their unified Electron model (I can't recall what they have…
All of this is much easier to do with native applications, running them in a browser just adds the need for crazy kludges and workarounds to simulate or enforce something you get for free if running native. Also you end up with managing hardware boxes with periphery attached and software running on them anyway, so whether managing a native application that is a browser which then runs the POS application or whether directly managing the POS application does not save you any work; if anything it even gives you an additional thing to manage, which increases maintenance effort and potential for failure (which quickly is catastrophic in this business, POS down today effectively means the store can close its doors).
Back-office applications in the same space are actually pretty well-suited for a web application, and frequently implemented as such today.
If you develop an application that runs in the web browser, I won't use it. That's not some dogmatic principle of mine, it's just an empirical fact. I use only one browser-based application: Gmail. I've never used another browser-based application and I can't imagine that I ever will unless there's truly no alternative and it's forced on me by an employer. I've happily paid for dozens of desktop applications, and I'm…
I don't get the downvotes: the original question asked about opinions on web-based vs. native apps, and this guys is giving exactly that. And what else could you do, you can either cite some usage statistics or give personal assessments.
(I wrote a fully native iMessage client for Windows 10 [0] and enjoyed it enough to consider building a product around the code, minus the iMessage component.)
Take any app that uses all cores nearly 100%, maybe maxes out the GPU eats 3-5GB of ram, and is a 2-100GB install. Those will always be native. These are your Cad programs, your video editors, your AAA games. You can make a cad program in a browser too. But you trade a chunk of perf for convenience, and thats only rarely acceptable. Anything that could ever be done in a mobile app (chat, media consumption, ..) those…
Tell that to Autodesk. Fusion is like 70% web, slow, and bloated. They don’t even have a good excuse since the whole UI is just a shell around a canvas and could easily be made native, it’s not as if they’re actually benefiting from the DOM or CSS.
Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have…
Slack desktop app is almost 1 gig in size. On a whim I just checked how big the copy of Adium still lingering in my Mac is: 60 megs. And Ripcord (a native discord/slack client) is a mere 40.
No internet? No web-app. I suppose I am increasingly frustrated with the inability to use my computer if it has no internet....
This needn’t be true. You can use a service worker to make the code load when offline, and IndexedDB to store data. As a trivial example, https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/ (which has no data storage requirements) works just fine offline. Offline support is a banner feature of the PWA (progressive web apps) movement.
If you, as a website owner, want me to run an application then you should ask for permissions. No ifs, no buts, no ors.
I prefer well-designed desktop applications to web applications for most things that don't naturally involve the web: * Email clients (I use Thunderbird) * Office suites * Music and media players * Maps * Information managers (e.g., password managers) * Development tools * Personal productivity tools (e.g., to-do lists) * Games As Windows starts on-boarding their unified Electron model (I can't recall what they have…