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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)

#71

Post by galaxyLogic »

kongin wrote: post #55
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/

> 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. Compared to what? C code I wrote in the 90s in middle school still compiles. JS code I wrote two weeks ago probably doesn't because the mountain of dependencies has shifte…

JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web. Therefore Node.js is a great platform for web-apps. There is also DENO which allows you to compile your JavaScript. For Node.js there is something similar in terms of Vercel/Pkg.

There are benefits to using the same language for both the front-end and back-end.

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

#72

Post by jamil7 »

creshal wrote: post #59
jamil7 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The big difference is that all three of them are still fully supported, and continue to receive updates. On Windows, 90% of UI toolkits are deprecated with no support, no bug fixes, nor migration guides.

That's fair. The fact that updates and fixes are shipped with OS versions makes it less useful (for us at least). People just don't upgrade their desktops like they do their phones.

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

#73

Post by blub »

moksly wrote: post #61
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." I work in the public sector of Denmark, which has always had native Windows apps for most of our systems. The past few years of suppliers moving to web based solutions have been such a blessing. Out of the around 300 it-systems we operate, the ones running in a browser are build…

Intranet apps are the ideal case for web technologies, because all their disadvantages either don’t apply or can be mitigated or ignored :-)

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

#74

Post by spaetzleesser »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #68

It is exactly the failure of Microsoft and Apple to propose any meaningful cross-platform API. Both are fighting to increase vendor lock-in - it is in their best interests that apps written on Windows don't work on macOS/iOS and the other way round. Linux/OS folks themselves are unable to solve this problem on their own and it becomes a mouse-and-cat game. The popularity of web apps helped to reduce the problem, but…

Microsoft has destroyed the Windows desktop singlehandedly on their own. Since Win8 and “Metro” they moved away from having consistent UI widgets like it was in Windows 2000 or XP but instead made the Windows desktop a Wild West if different UI paradigms. Even the ribbon introduced a new UI paradigm that wasn’t available to third party devs.

If even MS themselves doesn’t bother to be consistent then developers certainly won’t.

I am a long time Windows desktop dev but all my new projects are either web or Electron. I am done with the mess in Windows.

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

#75

Post by crazy_horse »

SPBS wrote: post #67

Why would anyone use Hyper? It's not like there aren't better terminal emulators out there for each platform. Using Electron to emulate a terminal is plain insanity to me, you are trading off performance and system resources for the js hype.

It feels like some point within the last few years tech became a place where you are identified by the tools you choose (ok, vim and emacs have been around). Not just that, but you sell your project based on those tools. So you can have that revolt app that showed up yesterday that for some ungodly reason disabled text selection on their website (user hostile as fuck) but it was getting advertised because it was Rust. The top selling point was theming via Electron. They have to sell the project before it's actually ready.

Blog posts like this are very thinly disguised advertisements for people like this guy who tweet all day about what tools they use. Which, he's successful, and more people are aware about this stuff than before. It used to be bad form to quote yourself, but tweet yourself? That's content.

I blame a big part of it on YC and the VC ethos of big big big instead of better better better.

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

#76

Post by Uberphallus »

eloisius wrote: post #65
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…

I don't even care about the memory footprint personally. I can buy more RAM. It's that every Electron app makes up all of it's own navigation paradigms, doesn't integrate well into the OS, and always feels slow.

I find this pretty funny.

In the 00s and early 10s, the Linux desktop was criticized because of the inconsistency in the look and feel, e.g. using Firefox (GTK) in KDE (Qt) plus random apps in Motif, TK, or straight up Swing. The consistency of Windows and OS X desktops was desired and looked for: people migrated themes across toolkits, synchronized font settings, etc.

Now every Electron app does their own thing and people don't seem to care one bit, but when I need to use one of them I feel like I'm using a different CSS-enhanced, antialias-enabled 90s Winamp skin for each app.

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

#77

Post by pantulis »

While I tend to agree that Electron is going to be more and more relevant, I'd like to counter-argument that native apps these days are accompanied by powerful vendor services. For example, if you target the Apple ecosystem you get CloudKit and can deploy syncing between devices very easily and translating operational infrastructure costs to the user. Need crypto? You have CryptoKit, and so on.

What this means: any app will try to expand to become multiplatform and multidevice but if that's the business case you are bound to be challenged by niche players that can execute better and with less cost for a single platform. I think both models can coexist, but niche players will always be niche players.

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

#78

Post by pantulis »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #29
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. 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…

I dont think parent was refering to web as in "web sites you can open in Safari", but apps built with web technologies, as in Ionic or similar.

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

#79

Post by emkoemko »

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…

yea but chromium has been ported to everything so your app will work exactly the same on any device chromium runs, that's the issue with writing native apps.. you then have to port it to all the devices and update on OS changes.

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

#80

Post by davidgerard »

Uberphallus wrote: post #76
eloisius wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even care about the memory footprint personally. I can buy more RAM. It's that every Electron app makes up all of it's own navigation paradigms, doesn't integrate well into the OS, and always feels slow.

I find this pretty funny. In the 00s and early 10s, the Linux desktop was criticized because of the inconsistency in the look and feel, e.g. using Firefox (GTK) in KDE (Qt) plus random apps in Motif, TK, or straight up Swing. The consistency of Windows and OS X desktops was desired and looked for: people migrated themes across toolkits, synchronized font settings, etc. Now every Electron app does their own thing and…

yes, this sort of objection is always fake
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