81–90 of 199 posts
I run VS Code, Slack, Discord, Spotify (not Electron, but web tech) all the time and I don't see problems[1]. I mainly use a 7 year old mac, nothing too beefy.
No, I wouldn't like to use a website instead. But I don't crave an actual native app that much either.
[1] Perhaps apart from Discord always updating itself, but that's their decision.
The only reason web apps are popular is portability. If it were easy to make one native app that ran on every computer, there would be a stampede toward it and a loud sucking sound from the vacuum of apps leaving the web. Java is a travesty and there's nothing else that's popular enough to sway an entire industry.
Web apps are shitty thin clients.
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…
You can program junk in any language. I've built a pretty neat real time web application using nothing but JavaScript and a little thinking. Could it be better? Yes, no doubt. I could have written it as a native application for all of the platforms that it currently supports (Desktop on Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile phones Android and iPhone). But I really don't have the time or the resources for that so this helped me…
Did this 'article' make anyone else's antenna twitch? Firstly, there's something about the combination of saying nothing new and adding very little opinion, plus a few writing/editorial oddities, makes me wonder if this is GPT-generated? Or at best, it's just comms copy from a non-specialist, banging something out in a hurry. (Noting that the author is COO of a 'communication agency'.) Secondly, given how uninteresti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Web apps don't require constant access to the internet.
"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++." This statement is misleading and false. The distinction between "interpreted" and "compiled" isn't as clear-cut as it once was, especially in the context of modern languages and runtimes. However, when it comes to JavaScript, here's the general understanding:…
Seems like a technicality to me, although I'd be happy to update the statement in the post. It's still not compiled in advance and while the technologies you described (asm.js, WebAssemly) exists most web apps discussed don't use them at all.
That being said, there is a caveat that the code _can_ change for something compiled JIT, and there are inefficiencies related to that.
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…
You can program junk in any language. I've built a pretty neat real time web application using nothing but JavaScript and a little thinking. Could it be better? Yes, no doubt. I could have written it as a native application for all of the platforms that it currently supports (Desktop on Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile phones Android and iPhone). But I really don't have the time or the resources for that so this helped me…
That's me. Like with Slack, both native and web versions are junk, but the web version is leaner and snappier. And no, generally me using the web version didn't cause any issues to anyone on corporate calls.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 see it mostly with what I would call “industrial applications”: video editing, CAD, etc. Besides games, consumer software tends not to be computationally intensive, so there are few consumer examples (which I think leads to a sort of “JavaScript is fast enough for everything” fallacy among web devs) I happen to write a newsletter where I interview this sort of company, here are some recent examples that use Wasm: -…
And by "real loads" I really mean just more than two dozen items on a list of whatever it is the app displays.
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.
Google Chat has a similar issue in that it uses a lot of memory for what it does and has a shitty UI, except it's actually a PWA.
I do get the cross platform benefit, but how many developers do you actually need to build an awesome native application, when much of the interaction is done on the backend anyway? Slack does seem a little complicated, but I have the feeling that you could do Google Chat with perhaps five developers per platform.