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In Defense of the Modern Web

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Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#101

Post by AlexandrB »

MrRadar wrote: post #83

> When I tap on a link on Tom's JS-free website, the browser first waits to confirm that it was a tap and not a brush/swipe, then makes a request, and then we have to wait for the response. With a framework-authored site with client-side routing, we can start to do more interesting things. We can make informed guesses based on analytics about which things the user is likely to interact with and preload the logic and…

> In my experience sites that do this are almost universally slower and less responsive than sites that just use normal links.

Yup. A car analogy: "Instead of waiting for the driver to turn the steering wheel before causing the car to turn, we put the car on the back of a flatbed truck that tracks driver behaviour and tries to predict their intent. Then we can start turning the flatbed truck a little bit sooner to improve user experience."

Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#102

Post by enahs-sf »

basch wrote: post #90
snazz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As discussed on a recent thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23137324 ), there are a variety of nice frontend tricks to make a server-rendered site feel nicer (LiveView, TurboLinks, Livewire, instant.page). I'm a fan of these kinds of solutions. For my 100% static website, https://instant.page does make it feel instant. TurboLinks feels a little "heavier" and has a more complex interaction with other fronte…

Another is: DerbyJS, Racer, and ShareDB who have been fighting for this future for what feels like forever, but meteorjs just torched it from a popularity perspective, in the the event-driven server-side rendering realm. Despite giving a much worse end user experience, it was more popular with developers. Is Lever really the only company using Derby? https://github.com/derbyjs/derby https://github.com/derbyjs/racer h…

makes me harken for the good old days of backbone.js. everything you need, nothing that you don't.

Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#103

Post by acdha »

rich_harris wrote: post #63
ss3000 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they dived deeper into the usage patterns and broke down app usage by specific apps, I'd suspect a vast majority of that time is spent in a tiny handful of popular apps, since there are also countless studies pointing to the fact that consumers don't install more than a handful of native apps. If you remove time spent in those popular apps and their respective websites from the stats, the data would likely paint a…

"If you remove some of the data, the data tells a different story"

Alternately, “If you don’t assume that all usage is fungible, the data tells a different story”. There are a few apps - music/movies/ebooks and Facebook - which get a disproportionately large amount of activity. If you’re not competing with them, the global numbers are going to be skewed.

This is especially true when you think about tasks rather than screen time. If I’m Facebook or Spotify selling ads, I want people glued to the app for a long time. If I’m selling things, giving information or customer service, etc. the story is completely different: someone placing an order faster is actually a win.

EDIT: My experience is colored by being in the cultural heritage space where the flurry of “we’re in the App Store!!!” entries met the hard reality of every engagement metric being much lower than web sites. There is huge variation hidden in global averages.

Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#104

Post by paulryanrogers »

amw-zero wrote: post #32
rich_harris wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your 10k npm dependencies Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways here: > The web is a success The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study ( https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/ ) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.

Well, I think this is really hyperbolic. I think it depends on the application, and the consumer. And the web is a tremendous success. You should take a step back and look at how your entire life is affected by the web. It seems really, really off the mark to say that the web is not a success. You can criticize it, sure. But - you are using a computer 100% because of the web, not because of spreadsheet software. Now,…

> I think the web community overall looks at native apps like they are some weird, alien technology because they're completely blinded by what they build and what tools they use.

There is some everything-looks-like-a-nail but that's not all. I'm making a native desktop app now which is slow going. Every platform I want to support is so different, and cross-platform tooling often requires branching and learning each ones quirks anyway.

Just making an Electron/ReactNative app is often the best of both worlds should a website not suffice. (Excluding concerns like battery life, app size, or memory footprint.)

Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#105

Post by enahs-sf »

rich_harris wrote: post #14
grey-area wrote: post #3

This author seems to think the only competitor to react is other js frameworks, when in fact most of the web's largest sites work just fine with small amounts of what he calls 'artisanal js'. You probably don't need your js framework, your 10k npm dependencies, or your complex mix of server and client side rendering. Not every website needs an api and clients to consume it, and not everything needs to be an app. The…

> your 10k npm dependencies Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways here: > The web is a success The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study ( https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/ ) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.

I'm still struggling to understand why my small react app which has 7 dependencies (4 of which are react, react-dom, react-router, react-router-dom) needs 615 node modules.

Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#106

Post by acdha »

amw-zero wrote: post #33
tashoecraft wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps only work for very specific use cases. The difficulty in getting people to download your app shows that. That study doesn’t seem to break down what apps are being used. I’m going to guess games, as they dominate the charts, or specific websites that have created mobile apps. Facebook, Twitter or maps, which are used for multiple hours straight when driving. If there is a site you use often enough it graduates to…

> The difficulty in getting people to download your app shows that This one I'm always interested in. What is difficult about downloading an app?

You’re on a web page. You can either do what you need or tap the install link, approve the install, wait for a huge download, find and open it, wait for it to initialize, authenticate in the app, and then find whatever you were doing. If you use this all the time it’s amortized over heavy usage but the vast majority of business apps are not, and every study I’ve seen shows people falling off at each of those stages.

Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#107

Post by saurik »

rich_harris wrote: post #14
grey-area wrote: post #3

This author seems to think the only competitor to react is other js frameworks, when in fact most of the web's largest sites work just fine with small amounts of what he calls 'artisanal js'. You probably don't need your js framework, your 10k npm dependencies, or your complex mix of server and client side rendering. Not every website needs an api and clients to consume it, and not everything needs to be an app. The…

> your 10k npm dependencies Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways here: > The web is a success The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study ( https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/ ) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.

While the percentage of time that I use in apps vs. the web is definitely heavily skewed, it is just two apps: Facebook and YouTube... occasionally Instagram or TikTok. Now ask the question "what percentage of products do you use are you using via an app or via the web" and the answer is going to be ridiculously dominated by the web: I might use 20 different products over the course of 10 minutes on the web while researching some topic, flipping between hacker news, stack overflow, medium, smaller personal blogs, documentation from microsoft or mozilla, major and minor news sites... this list is absolutely endless. Even for sites I might use that have an app, I am not going to open that app for just the one page I want from it as that's slower and pointless as I probably only want to use that site for five seconds.

Essentially, you have purposefully asked the wrong question in order to lie to us using statistics.

Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#108

Post by basch »

enahs-sf wrote: post #102
basch wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another is: DerbyJS, Racer, and ShareDB who have been fighting for this future for what feels like forever, but meteorjs just torched it from a popularity perspective, in the the event-driven server-side rendering realm. Despite giving a much worse end user experience, it was more popular with developers. Is Lever really the only company using Derby? https://github.com/derbyjs/derby https://github.com/derbyjs/racer h…

makes me harken for the good old days of backbone.js. everything you need, nothing that you don't.

I think its kinda great that you can just use ShareDB with whatever else you use, or also use racer, or go full blown framework. The way its abstracted gives you the power to choose more or less.

Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#109

Post by paulryanrogers »

noad wrote: post #38
rich_harris wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your 10k npm dependencies Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways here: > The web is a success The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study ( https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/ ) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.

Yeah, we let the web become Cable TV. It's dying the same slow death as Cable TV while executives scratch their heads about why the perpetual growth stopped. The advertising is so pervasive, so annoying, so invasive and so awful it just makes the medium unusable. The same trends are starting to creep into podcasting and video games and I just wish people would realize they are slowly destroying their own businesses w…

Mobile games do have a lot of ads, thankfully desktop games have not yet suffered that fate. And it's often possible to pay to remove ads from mobile.

Re: In Defense of the Modern Web

#110

Post by csande17 »

> I'm not aware of any other platform where you're expected to write the logic for your initial render using a different set of technologies than the logic for subsequent interactions. The very idea sounds daft.

It's not a perfect parallel, but this reminds me of systems like Qt Designer, or Apple's Interface Builder/Storyboard, or Android's XML layout system. Those systems all essentially give you an "initial render" made with one technology (XML files created in some sort of visual GUI-builder program) and "subsequent interactions" made with another (C++/Swift/Java code).

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