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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)

#121

Post by blub »

evilos wrote: post #64
nineteen999 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Visual effects artists and embedded programmers are very niche communities (former embedded SW engineer here). Probably something like 90% of people just need a browser 90% of the time. It's kind of a no brainer from a business point of view. If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be. Of course there are drawbacks but the economics are in the browser's favor.

"If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be. Of course there are drawbacks but the economics are in the browser's favor"

This right here is the reason there are many browser-based apps - it's really convenient for the company, damn the users. The company can do whatever they want, whenever they want and have full access to both telemetry and user data.

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

#122

Post by blub »

dannyw wrote: post #83
wastholm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mea…

Better compatibility. I have a machine that still runs Windows 7; and electron apps rarely have issues. Many native apps no longer work on my OS.

Malware's backwards compatible with Windows 7. In fact it gets better and better the more time passes.

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

#123

Post by scns »

xfer wrote: post #9
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.

No it isn't, even the govt apps in my country have ads in them. With firefox i can easily block them, for apps this becomes much harder, if dns blocking isn't sufficient.

What The Flying spaghetti monster?

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

#124

Post by blub »

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.

Your comment can be interpreted in two opposite ways, but it seems you meant that native apps allow the better tracking and ad delivery.

While mobile apps are quite awful from this perspective, you must consider that the web is by far the most efficient platform for ad delivery and tracking.

It's the web which has cookie pop-ups with dozens and dozens of companies that want to track you.

It's the web which led to the development of ad blockers.

It's the web where an app developer has full access to your data on their servers.

It's the web where an app developer can at any time flip a switch and turn on telemetry, ads, etc.

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

#125

Post by dTal »

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…

Ironically, look and feel consistency on Linux is now excellent. Most things are written in GTK or Qt, and it's not hard to get them looking identical. It's even possible to run a system that uses entirely Qt apps on top of KDE, which gets you Win95 levels of consistency.

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

#126

Post by scns »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #25
Razengan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

On Android you can block every app with relatively fine grained control via TrackerControl [0]. Sometimes a little fiddly but worth it IMHO. You can download directly from the site, use the official client or use the much snappier Foxy Droid [1] that lacks features but i still recommend it.

[0] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.f...

[1] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/nya.kitsunyan.foxydroid/

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

#127

Post by boomlinde »

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…

I don't get this. I've used GTK, Qt, Tk and FLTK software in OSX, Windows and Linux. The rest is usually covered by standard libraries and third party libraries.

So I take it this approach is disqualified on your terms for not being meaningful, which raises the question about what "meaningful" means.

My own guess is that it's a matter of convenience of distribution: enter an URL and you can start using the app.

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

#128

Post by thrower123 »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #74
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 certai…

Yes. I would argue that it is precisely the obsession with cross-platform that has destroyed native desktop applications. If all you are offering with your native desktop framework is a dumbed-down experience, because it has to also run on tablets and phones and TVs and game consoles and smart refrigerators, then you quickly get to a place where there are few advantages in going native over shipping a webapp in a Chrome wrapper.

Windows 8 was a catastrophic failure, and Apple seems to be leaning into the same failed philosophy now.

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

#129

Post by the_duke »

pantulis wrote: post #77

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 a…

You can always extend Electron apps with platform-native capabilities.

Things like Neon [1], a wrapper for writing node bindings in Rust, make this particularly convenient. You can then use Rust to call into platform native APIs.

It's more work, but you can still benefit from cross platform UI development and augment it with native code where appropriate.

[1] https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon

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

#130

Post by roenxi »

crazy_horse wrote: post #62
preommr wrote: post #50

Everyone noticed. What was less obvious was that electron would grow this big and still be this bad. How is the memory usage still so inefficient?

Did you see that the top post on HN for a decent chunk of yesterday was celebrating that they were getting 200 rps? 200 rps was not something to brag about to your parents 15 years ago, but half of HN seems to have never heard of serving a static file through Nginx. I don't want to be overdramatic but it confused the hell out of me and it made me worry about the industry. How can you have all these people cargo-culti…

Put it this way - most websites probably never reach single digit rps. And it really doesn't matter if the limit is 200 rps when a website is only serving 1 rps.

Then there will be so many people involved in website building that the 1-2% who know what is going on will be enough to overwhelm the demand of people who need to run high-scale websites.

People might waste an order of magnitude more resources than they need in the process, but realistically the absolute value lost is small.

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