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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)

#41

Post by jamil7 »

smackeyacky wrote: post #20
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/

It doesn't help that for the major consumer platform (Windows), Microsoft can't make their mind up about how to replace Win32 or WinForms. It seems like every other week there is some new framework announced, so even if you have a need to make a native app, choosing how to do it has become near impossible. Is it .NET Maui? Should I try Electronize? or take a huge punt on Avalonia? It's easier just to wrap up a web ap…

Ha, and on the mac side we now have AppKit, SwiftUI and Catalyst and any combination of those you feel like.

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

#42

Post by gobookdev »

vmladenov wrote: post #39
speedgoose wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have a lot web apps on mobile because the mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general (unless you have a 10 years old hardware with very little ram or are into old school GUI I know). The companies making web browsers and mobile operating systems are the same companies making native app…

Electron’s user experience is atrocious even on recent hardware. It falls right into the uncanny valley of superficially appearing native and while not behaving natively.

VS Code is my fav piece of software of all time, it's an Electron app

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

#43

Post by mlang23 »

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 I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

Most web apps are an accessibility disaster compared to their native counterparts. I guess that is not the main blocking factor, but not being native has subtle disadvantages all over the place. I remember there was actually a time where web apps were a trend, but most vendors stopped doing that since they just couldn't provide a really smooth user experience.

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

#44

Post by lewisjoe »

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

Simple equation. Efficiency of a mobile device is directly proportional to the efficiency of the runtime the apps are running on. For example Objective-C / swift has a GC-less memory model which just means we get to do more with less memory. This is how iPhone typically ship with lesser RAM than Android phones, yet do everything that Android phones are capable of surprisingly well.

Desktops/Laptops have no need to worry about extreme memory efficiency. They are always/usually connected to a power outlet. But mobile platforms on the other hand need extreme memory efficiency to get by with battery power.

If you do the math, the abstractions that the web provides comes with a huge cost. A virtual rendering engine, a programming runtime that is notorious for bad memory management and all this on top of a huge VM called the browser. It doesn't scale.

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

#45

Post by wastholm »

speedgoose wrote: post #19
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

You don't have a lot web apps on mobile because the mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general (unless you have a 10 years old hardware with very little ram or are into old school GUI I know). The companies making web browsers and mobile operating systems are the same companies making native app…

> mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general

Electron apps are perhaps faster and cheaper to make than native desktop GUI apps for most organizations because they already have Web developers, but I've never heard anyone claim they're "better" than native, if that's what you're saying. Do you mean they're somehow better for the end user? If so, how?

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

#46

Post by toastal »

irrational wrote: post #7
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 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.

Yes. We had to do native because there are no Push Notifications on Safari mobile. I understand people hating the permission pop-ups on marketing-saturated blogs and other places that don't need it, but that's the whole purpose of a web app is to be more app-like and less static-website-like.

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

#48

Post by nineteen999 »

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.

The media creation community is looks at the web programming community and wondering what the hell you are talking about, and why your view is so narrow.

Blender, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Visual Studio, ProTools, Reaper, Substance Suite etc. etc. the list goes on and on. These kind of applications often have extremely heavy system requirements and are often extremely sensitive to latency, and are just not going up and "migrate to the cloud" anytime soon.

Embedded programming is another example. A lot of developers work in this space.

> I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above.

Your personal requirements, as lightweight and easily offloadable as they are, do not represent the wider community. I am constantly astounded by how blinkered the web community appears to be about this.

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