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Web apps are better than no apps

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Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#41

Post by matwood »

nottheengineer wrote: post #10

I hate to agree with this. Web is the best way to cram loads of features into a limited amount of dev time. But still, whenever I use Teams, something like this happens: I click a button, nothing happens. I wait 10 seconds, because teams sometimes just needs a little longer. Nothing happens. I click the button again, it finally starts doing something. 5 seconds later, the thing I wanted appears. And every time it hap…

> whenever I use Teams

Terrible software can be coded in any language.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#42

Post by mozey »

Instead of wrapping the application with something like Electron, why not install as a service and connect to a localhost port using your default browser?

I know this is not the same UX as installing an app. But why isn't this technique more standard?

Besides more efficient resource usage, another benefit is that it keeps the client/server architecture.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#43

Post by pjc50 »

nsonha wrote: post #12
nottorp wrote: post #9

Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website? And what's that about notes taking 120 Mb, when Electron apps start at 3-400 Mb? Deceptively split into and Not to mention when you leave a chat app like Discord or Slack running and they keep instatiating those meme gifs forever, until you run out of ram.

the website mechanism has so many flaws, an abitrary code size restriction for once, constant access to the internet for another. And you can't really tell if the code you run today is the same as that yesterday.

Websites have a code size restriction? What is it?

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#44

Post by ozim »

paulgb wrote: post #27
nottorp wrote: post #9

Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website? And what's that about notes taking 120 Mb, when Electron apps start at 3-400 Mb? Deceptively split into and Not to mention when you leave a chat app like Discord or Slack running and they keep instatiating those meme gifs forever, until you run out of ram.

Electron isn’t just a website-as-an-executable, it has a whole separate API that goes what a browser does/could/should offer. https://zeke.github.io/electron.atom.io/docs/api/

I would explain it in a way that electron has API and access to stuff that a browser should not/does not/never will have.

Browser should be much more sand boxed and never have access to the file system with privileges of a user running browser.

Yes, someone can install malicious electron app but that is totally different than randomly stumbling upon malicious website while browsing/clicking around.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#45

Post by easton »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #31
endisneigh wrote: post #16

> There are just too many levels, and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++. JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled. For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway, other than some exceptio…

> I'm honestly surprised the Chromium team hasn't already addressed this with the Electron team somehow by now Well, a solution might be to share the chromium "vm" across all electron app, but maintaining compatibility will be horribly difficult so, no I guess.

Microsoft has this on Windows: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/

Teams 2 is supposed to use it (and there's a couple smaller system apps that use it).

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#47

Post by jasode »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #40
paulgb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway I think there’s some selection bias in this; the apps that get built as web apps tend to be the ones that are not bottlenecked by JavaScript. For exceptions that are pushing the limits of performance, you’ll more often than not find Rust/C++ compiled to Wasm in the stack.

I've always wondered what kind of apps these are. The vast majority of web apps I use are all CRUD. I can't think of a single webapp or electron app I use which performs heavy computation. Maybe VSCode? But I don't know if any of the computation is happening on the frontend. People have been extolling the virtues of WASM to me for a while but I have yet to find a use for it where it improved the speed of development,…

>I've always wondered what kind of apps these are. The vast majority of web apps I use are all CRUD.

This page has a list of examples: https://madewithwebassembly.com/

Many apps that are not CRUD need more efficient cpu performance of WASM... physics rendering engines, AutoCAD modeling, machine learning, etc.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#48

Post by coldtea »

endisneigh wrote: post #16

> There are just too many levels, and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++. JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled. For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway, other than some exceptio…

>For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway, other than some exception cases like WebGL-type stuff.

If we're talking about a glorified form/CRUD app, no.

For web apps proper, that's not really the case.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#49

Post by zztop44 »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #40
paulgb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway I think there’s some selection bias in this; the apps that get built as web apps tend to be the ones that are not bottlenecked by JavaScript. For exceptions that are pushing the limits of performance, you’ll more often than not find Rust/C++ compiled to Wasm in the stack.

I've always wondered what kind of apps these are. The vast majority of web apps I use are all CRUD. I can't think of a single webapp or electron app I use which performs heavy computation. Maybe VSCode? But I don't know if any of the computation is happening on the frontend. People have been extolling the virtues of WASM to me for a while but I have yet to find a use for it where it improved the speed of development,…

Figma is a good example. Likewise, many games. Google Sheets? GIS apps? Probably the next big things in both DAWs and video editing will be in the browser too…

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#50

Post by bobajeff »

As someone who has looked into using Gtk+, Qt, Wxwidgets, Dear Imgui, Nuklear, Druid and Lazarus, I see the appeal of Electron.

At some point a native gui toolkit feels just as, if not more, limited than a web UI in Electron only with scarcer documentation and guides/tutorials to help you.

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