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Web apps are better than no apps

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Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#151

Post by igouy »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #138
fouric wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. Funny that you say "not even remotely close" while providing zero evidence yourself, but then ask other people to present their evidence. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... There you go. There's the evidence. No goalpost-moving, please. For evidence that Javascript can be used to build large, production-quality applica…

Speed is achieved via optimization, which is achieved via constraints. Javascript is being known for its inefficiency. Saying JS is just as fast is a hot take and whoever claims that has the burden to proof otherwise. Sorry, about benchmarks I just quote myself: > I take these performance benchmarks with a rock of salt. They are mostly hyper-optimzied generics which are as far away from actual production code as it c…

> done by people who know exactly what they are doing

Do you think we should only compare JavaScript written by newbies?

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#152

Post by paulmd »

wackget wrote: post #123
epolanski wrote: post #109

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 acces…

Absolutely. For anything internet-based (social media, chat, meetings etc.) web apps are vastly superior for this reason. In fact, anything which doesn't explicitly need the richness of a true desktop GUI (e.g. Photoshop or games) should probably be a web app. In addition to the massive benefit of running browser-sandboxed, web apps are also: 1. Easier to start and stop (open/close a tab) 2. Less permanent (clear you…

> Desktop computing needs a massive push towards finely-grained privacy/security controls in a similar way to how browsers work.

Sure. That’s iOS app sandboxing. And people perpetually complain about the inconvenience of having each application in its own file space and having to click a button (or, gasp, go to the files app) to make data appear in another sandbox.

If you can’t make the UX seamless, as in “the OS can read your mind and know which things to make available in the sandbox” then people will complain. And if you weaken that and start letting more through then you lose the benefits of sandboxing. It’s the same battle that seclinux has faced - secure configurations are often quite inconvenient.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#153

Post by Klonoar »

epolanski wrote: post #109

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 acces…

I support the idea of using a web app over a native app to avoid tampering, but it’s a bit of a leap to say “Discord tracks all of my activity on my computer”.

Typically, that type of game notification is the game reporting it. Games want to have that Discord integration.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#154

Post by igouy »

paulddraper wrote: post #122
DarkNova6 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And yet it has been optimized. > Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... JS is ~30% slower than Java or Go. Go is a lot closer to JS perf than to C++ perf. --- For real-world applications....…

Some pictures:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#155

Post by ziml77 »

wackget wrote: post #123
epolanski wrote: post #109

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 acces…

Absolutely. For anything internet-based (social media, chat, meetings etc.) web apps are vastly superior for this reason. In fact, anything which doesn't explicitly need the richness of a true desktop GUI (e.g. Photoshop or games) should probably be a web app. In addition to the massive benefit of running browser-sandboxed, web apps are also: 1. Easier to start and stop (open/close a tab) 2. Less permanent (clear you…

This misses that the browser sandbox doesn't include sandboxing internet access. I can't be sure that the application will never send what I enter into it out to the server that's hosting the app. Also any changes to the app's code are not obvious. I could be served different code each time I refresh the page, or it could be pulled in the background and evaled.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#156

Post by ravenstine »

epolanski wrote: post #109

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 acces…

Frankly, I have more confidence that a web app will actually work, which is why I usually default to them if I can.

I can't tell you how many times I've installed an Android app by a big company and it was fundamentally broken in some way. This would happen even if I was using a non-rooted phone, though on my current rooted phone the problem is slightly worse when an app somehow detects that I'm rooted and prevents me from using it. Say what you want about the "clunkiness" of webpages, but I've used tons of native apps that aren't even using webviews that are extremely clunky and slow. The web loads plenty of unneeded crap, but native developers don't seem to give a f*** if their app bundles are half a gigabyte. Maybe it's because they all need to ship AI models now or whatever.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#157

Post by nottheengineer »

_fat_santa wrote: post #100
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 has to be the poster child of “enterprise software”. I’m currently on contract at a large healthcare company and I’m starting to understand how an app as abominable as Teams could be built. The issue isn’t really with the tech stack, though electron is not the best, other companies like Discord have managed to build much better apps on top of it. The issue I see is organizational. What happens is you have a top…

This is what happens when there is no competition. If microsoft wasn't able to force their way into companies by bundling teams with all the other office crap that non-technical people want, I doubt anyone would seriously pick it over anything else. The amount of issues it has (and therefore the amount of work it causes) is insane. I have yet to see a streak of 5 calls without issues that require an interruption to fix.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#158

Post by Klonoar »

mavhc wrote: post #20
quickthrower2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair a native iOS app will look the same on a new iPhone and same with android apps on a new android based phone.

iOS apps tend to have back buttons, vs Android's swipe from left side to go back

This paradigm isn’t necessarily correct for the modern iOS experience. Many apps I use can be handled with just swiping down or back.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#159

Post by endisneigh »

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…

The key words here are: "around", which is to say same order of magnitude for performance, and "in some cases" which is to say for certain applications. I've already posted evidence for this claim specifically in sibling posts.

Also, why do you compare JS written by amateurs with Go/Java experts? There are JS experts too.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#160

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

wackget wrote: post #123
epolanski wrote: post #109

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 acces…

Absolutely. For anything internet-based (social media, chat, meetings etc.) web apps are vastly superior for this reason. In fact, anything which doesn't explicitly need the richness of a true desktop GUI (e.g. Photoshop or games) should probably be a web app. In addition to the massive benefit of running browser-sandboxed, web apps are also: 1. Easier to start and stop (open/close a tab) 2. Less permanent (clear you…

Unless you want to touch USB (WebUSB sometimes work, sometimes don't) or Bluetooth - Good luck on iOS where Apple is not supporting BLE interface on purpose, but on Windows and Android situation is not much better. Even ChromeOS can't run Web Bluetooth properly. Supported on paper, does not work anyway.
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