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Inspecting Web Views in macOS

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS

#11

Post by hiptobecubic »

adamnemecek wrote: post #3

GUI development is really fucking broken. I get it, it's hard to compete with a standardized platform with a probably billion man hours poured into it but I'm really hoping that Rust will make it possible to write native and web experiences from one codebase.

What does rust have to do with this?

Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS

#12

Post by userbinator »

This might explain why, although I'm not a constant user of Mac, whenever I've had to use it, the UI has felt a little (and in the newer versions, significantly) more sluggish than Windows on the same hardware. It's not hard to see how someone accustomed to that level of responsiveness could find Electron not too different from a "native" app that's actually doing much the same thing.

Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS

#13

Post by simondotau »

The headline isn't technically wrong but it's a tiny bit misleading because the use of web views is limited to a small number of iCloud account screens. These aren't really "system" preferences so much as Apple cloud service settings which have been wedged into System Preferences.

(And where it is used, it's doing the barest minimum. The preference window itself, the top bar, and the iCloud sidebar are all still native UI.)

Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS

#14

Post by r00tanon »

adamnemecek wrote: post #3

GUI development is really fucking broken. I get it, it's hard to compete with a standardized platform with a probably billion man hours poured into it but I'm really hoping that Rust will make it possible to write native and web experiences from one codebase.

I missed the /s ?

Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS

#15

Post by zer0-c00l »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #11
adamnemecek wrote: post #3

GUI development is really fucking broken. I get it, it's hard to compete with a standardized platform with a probably billion man hours poured into it but I'm really hoping that Rust will make it possible to write native and web experiences from one codebase.

What does rust have to do with this?

it allows OP to farm karma effectively

Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS

#16

Post by iso8859-1 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #3

GUI development is really fucking broken. I get it, it's hard to compete with a standardized platform with a probably billion man hours poured into it but I'm really hoping that Rust will make it possible to write native and web experiences from one codebase.

This post is talking mostly about CSS and it shows a document object model tree. JavaScript is also used, given that he mentions React.

Among these options, it seems that Rust is most similar to JavaScript. But this whole article would be the same if React was written with Rust instead.

So what is the broken part of GUI development, and why is Rust positioned to fix it? As I see it, not much would change if we used Rust instead of JavaScript, except that it could be harder to diagnose when ReactInRust is being used.

Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS

#17

Post by jollybean »

lucasyvas wrote: post #4

OK interesting - but why?

Probably because the devs want to do something and have no properly useful tools available to them, so they use something out of convenience.

It feels a bit tacky to me that Apple would use something a bit janky, it points at a bit of a gap in tooling.

Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS

#18

Post by ketzo »

johnfn wrote: post #10

Wow. I always thought the argument in favor of using web technologies on the desktop was that cross-platform became easier. And yet here is an example of the most unambiguously single-platform app I can possibly imagine, and under the hood it uses web - and React of all things! Crazy.

As it turns out, React / CSS / the document-object-model are popular for more reasons than “it works on different computers.” Who knew!

Re: Inspecting Web Views in macOS

#19

Post by efortis »

woodruffw wrote: post #9
efortis wrote: post #2

Awesome! Do you know more Web Views in use?

Don't quote me on this, but I believe that Apple Music (nee iTunes) has used web views for a long time; probably over a decade. The entire thing probably isn't a web view, but my recollection is that the store components were.

Library -> Albums has some onHover feedback, which I haven't seen anywhere else.

I guess the Help documents are Web Views as well, e.g. right-click on an image.

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