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The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

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Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#21

Post by xvector »

hresvelgr wrote: post #6

Web still has by far the best developer experience + cross platform stability, not to mention the lowest barrier to entry. I would be really interested to see what happens with Tauri[1] as that looks like a more promising alternative to Electron. I do want to see a return to native apps but there are no worthwhile incentives to do so outside of "our customers demanded a native app." [1] https://tauri.studio/en/

> I do want to see a return to native apps but there are no worthwhile incentives to do so outside of "our customers demanded a native app."

Every native app I have ever used has been many times snappier than its Electron/Web equivalent. Think on why customers demand native apps.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#22

Post by smackeyacky »

Razengan wrote: post #17
irrational wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Apple has made it so that every browser on their mobile devices is basically really Safari under the hood. And they have purposefully crippled Safari to push developers to the lucrative app store. Nothing is going to change until this changes, either through consumer behavior or through legislation.

Web apps purposefully cripple mobile performance, battery life and accessibility. Nothing is going to change until this changes.

Not to mention device level access like Bluetooth integration, making phone calls, using the camera etc. Mobile apps are hard to do as web apps if they are anything more complex than a front end for some web system.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#23

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #2

Electron apps are still desktop apps. The web however did eat the desktop: everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app. I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above. I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app

video editing, DAWs, music notation, CAD/CAM, 3D modelling (think Blender), compilers, linkers, IDE's other than VSCode, local photo management, media players, messaging services (telegram etc), device management ... these and many more called and laughed at your claim.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#24

Post by vbezhenar »

hresvelgr wrote: post #6

Web still has by far the best developer experience + cross platform stability, not to mention the lowest barrier to entry. I would be really interested to see what happens with Tauri[1] as that looks like a more promising alternative to Electron. I do want to see a return to native apps but there are no worthwhile incentives to do so outside of "our customers demanded a native app." [1] https://tauri.studio/en/

> our customers demanded a native app

Isn't customer demands are the main incentive for any developer?

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#25

Post by AussieWog93 »

Razengan wrote: post #18
AussieWog93 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Harder to track people and feed them ads.

> Harder to track people and feed them ads. In native apps, you mean?

It's not about whether they're native code or using a cross-platform API, but the fact that they're not web pages running in a browser. This allows them to "phone home" even when they're just running in the background, push notifications and bypass certain types of Adblocking (such as uBlock in Firefox).

There is a good reason why so many websites push you to use the apps on mobile.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#26

Post by vbezhenar »

mastrsushi wrote: post #14

There’s nothing wrong with the industry wanting to switch to layout engines for desktop applications. The problem is that this type of runtime environment is still fairly new. Desktop OS’s should have HTML/JS runtime built into the application layer, maybe even deeper. It’s such a dominant user functionality these days. Instead we get a bunch of headless chrome instances. There needs to be an engine that maybe isn’t…

Chrome is not memory-hungry. Webapps are.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#28

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

d3nj4l wrote: post #16
bsenftner wrote: post #12

Even for 2017, this is extremely late thinking. Back in '10 it was clear the consumer desktop was dying a rapid death. Now professional and business software are going the same way, and it is no wonder because nobody respects desktop development anymore. The advent of tools like Cosmopolatan libc are looking too late and too "hard" for new developers to catch on, so far...

Re: cosmopolitan libc: As cool as it is, I don't think the barrier to widespread adoption of C as a greenfield language for application development was ever that things didn't run cross-platform, it was, you know, the footguns and complexity of building anything significant in C.

I don't know how old you are, but at 57 and having been "computing" for 35 years, I'd say that this is wrong, on two levels.

1. C has been the green field language for application for decades.

2. The major obstacle is precisely cross-platform development; without a fairly thick layer to abstract away the OS API/platform, it's very difficult.

In addition to those two, there's the detail that lots of development projects want in-browser capabilities, and that essentially rules out compiled languages (ignoring the developing options for webasm, even though they still do not take it as far as native C/C++).

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#29

Post by AnthonyMouse »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #4
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #2

Electron apps are still desktop apps. The web however did eat the desktop: everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app. I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above. I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Harder to track people and feed them ads.

> Harder to track people and feed them ads.

This is it. And it's really the app stores that make them so.

On desktop, people are wary about installing programs, because they can pretty much do anything. So you can get people to visit your website who would never in a million years install your app on their PC.

With app stores, people assume that apps are safe, because that's what they were promised. But then the apps are hoovering up all their personal information, even more than they get from a web page on a desktop. And the app stores that claim to be constraining bad behavior don't kick them out for it because huge social networks are some of the few companies with enough market power to divert their users to another phone platform.

Re: The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

#30

Post by MattGaiser »

xvector wrote: post #21
hresvelgr wrote: post #6

Web still has by far the best developer experience + cross platform stability, not to mention the lowest barrier to entry. I would be really interested to see what happens with Tauri[1] as that looks like a more promising alternative to Electron. I do want to see a return to native apps but there are no worthwhile incentives to do so outside of "our customers demanded a native app." [1] https://tauri.studio/en/

> I do want to see a return to native apps but there are no worthwhile incentives to do so outside of "our customers demanded a native app." Every native app I have ever used has been many times snappier than its Electron/Web equivalent. Think on why customers demand native apps.

But are you willing to pay 2x for that extra snappiness?
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