Web apps are better than no apps • Hacker News Board

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#101

Post by shortrounddev2 » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #89

paulgb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: -…

Webdevs seem to have a blind spot around UI. Plenty of end-user apps - like music players - and websites - like e-commerce stores - tend to have compute-intensive UIs . They may not look compute-intensive for a dev on a beefy machine, playing with mockups and toy loads, but they absolutely become noticeable compute hogs on real machines with real loads. And by "real loads" I really mean just more than two dozen items…

My company has several tables in our UI whose API endpoints simply query for all records in that table without pagination. hundreds of rows are loaded into a table plugin, even if you'll never get past the first page

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#102

Post by rhaway84773 » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

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 suspect MS is working on some sort of common browser layer for Electron apps on Windows.

Their primary reasoning for picking V8 for Edge was that node, electron etc were built on V8.

We haven’t seen anything specific to those environments in Windows yet. I expect that to probably change pretty soon.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#103

Post by DarkNova6 » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence.

JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And js developers without any clue about memory will happily allocate hundreds of thousands of unnecessary objects to save a line of code. Completely unknowingly of course.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#104

Post by stronglikedan » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 2:08 PM UTC

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…

It's funny that Teams web app works flawlessly for me in Edge browser, but I can't get the native client to even start properly. I can't say whether the web client is a parity match for the native client, but it suits my needs, so I just always use it instead.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#105

Post by HeckFeck » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #70

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…

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…

NetMeeting managed live conferencing over 56k lines and on Pentium IIs. A tragically underappreciated piece of software, Skype before Skype with directories and the lot.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#106

Post by HeckFeck » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #73

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…

Teams is just shit. Discord is also a web app and works great.

Discord's UI occasionally has me cursing but at least they've kept it consistent. And it is true that it doesn't have the same performance problems.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#107

Post by gizmo » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

DarkNova6 wrote: post #103

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…

> 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. Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And js developers without any clue about memory will happily allocate hundreds of thousands of unnecessary objects to save a line of code. Completely…

Quake 1 (about 100k lines of C) runs in the browser just fine: https://www.netquake.io/quake

Yes, it's a 30 year old game but the typical CRUD web app doesn't have close to the complexity of quake. Good C++ code is significantly faster than JS, that's true, but JS is also much, much faster than you'd think.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#108

Post by afavour » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #60

afavour wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this really bugs me because it leads people down the path of WASM craziness when the language is rarely the problem. Most web apps are slow because the DOM is slow.

The DOM is plenty fast. Most web apps use it for what it wasn't meant to do, in an inefficient matter, with useless rerenders and overhead.

Let me clarify: the DOM is fast _at what it does_. But in order to truly serve things like web apps rather than documents it needs to have primitives like list virtualization. It doesn't, so people end up using needlessly complex JavaScript frameworks that drag down performance.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#109

Post by epolanski » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 2:21 PM UTC

One thing that makes me use a web-app rather than a native one on PC is that I know for a fact that the browser app will be very limited in tampering with my computer, something I'm not so sure about when installing native applications.

Often I see Nvidia's or Microsoft's or Discord's own services snooping in my installed applications, but it can go much further with, e.g., applications like grammarly that have access to my current buffer and clipboard virtually everywhere.

Another example, if I use Discord's web it has no real way of knowing what I'm doing on my PC, but when I used the desktop client, it showed and notified publicly half the world I was on Fortnite (even though, I was trying the Verse programming language in Fortnite's editor) which means that Discord tracks all of my activities on my computer.

Thus, honestly, I'd rather choose the web version of most applications 9 times out of 10, I simply have no clue what native applications know, do, and it's hard for me to debug what data they are sending and receiving, something that's quite transparent if I open the dev tools.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#110

Post by gspencley » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #81

I don't get what's all the hate around Electron apps to be honest. 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 example you provided that doesn't strictly need network based functionality for its core purpose is VS Code.

Slack, Discord and Spotify are all "web-based" to their core in the sense that they have an in-built client/server model as part of their core design and purpose. So in those examples, the only thing we have to complain about is the rendering / presentation layer.

And that kind of shifts the goalpost if you focus on those types of apps in my opinion.

Because my dislike for web apps is not strictly that they are using a browser-based presentation engine. If those UIs felt sluggish to me then I might choose to blame the underlying tech, but I wouldn't question it as much if they were not network-enabled applications in the first place (unless UI performance was a real pain and I thought they could perform better using something native).

The real issue for me is that our industry likes to chase trends like they are all or nothing. I don't like that every single application is moving to a web-based model whether or not it makes sense for that app. For the majority of my personal use, I don't need my applications to be network-enabled in the first place. I don't want them to sync to cloud storage, or provide collaboration features. I don't want to have to have an "account" with some SaaS company to use a word processor or a photo manipulation program.

I want my data local. I don't want my usage and data tracked. I don't want the app to stop working if my ISP has an outage and I don't want my data and app to disappear if the company goes out of business. I also don't like that web apps tend to see a much higher rate of UI changes pushed to the user. Software versions have largely disappeared for end-users and marketing. Now it's a continuous stream of pushed changes whether you chose to "upgrade" or not.