App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) • Hacker News Board

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#291

Post by hnthrowaway2376 » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:07 AM UTC

leptons wrote: post #253

hnthrowaway2376 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RAM is cheap RAM is cheap for you. It's always silly when people bring up their top-of-the-line computer into discussions about performance. Software shouldn't be just for the top 1%.

Apple RAM is expensive. Every other kind of RAM is pretty cheap. 32GB DDR4 can be had for under $30, and 16GB DDR4 can be had for about $25. I'm not sure who you think has a computer, is developing software, and can't afford that. Maybe someone in India, I guess. Too bad if that's you, but "top 1%" is a laughable claim when RAM is so cheap. 16GB of RAM is nowhere near "top of the line". You're just trolling here, "hn…

> Apple RAM is expensive. Every other kind of RAM is pretty cheap. 32GB DDR4 can be had for under $30, and 16GB DDR4 can be had for about $25.

I'm sure that's pretty cheap for you, yes. Taxes and other fees tend to increase those prices outside the US, by the way.

> I'm not sure who you think has a computer, is developing software, and can't afford that.

There is a market for lightweight code editors, isn't there?

> Too bad if that's you, but "top 1%" is a laughable claim when RAM is so cheap.

That was a bit of hyperbole on my part, but let's not forget that just being an employed SWE in the US easily places you in the top 1% globally.

> I've used VSCode on a computer with 2GB of RAM, and it worked. I expected everything to run slower - and it did run slower, but it ran. And I developed, and contributed to the project I was working on while away from my workstation. This was a cheap $70 Windows 10 tablet. YMMV.

Fair enough. VSCode is hardly the worst offender though - it actually runs quite well for an Electron app.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#292

Post by joshribakoff » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:08 AM UTC

nox101 wrote: post #272

thot_experiment wrote: post #159

I man don't get me wrong, I love the idea of PWAs but this dude is out to lunch. It's so painful making anything complex work cross browser/cross platform. On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You definitely can't Bluetooth outside of Chrome (probably only on Android and Windows too because nothing fun is ever allowed on Macs). Multiplayer games you kind of need UDP. You cannot UDP in th…

Do you need UDP? I see lots of multiplayer browser games. Here's a few https://browsergames.gg/ Google shows me a bunch of RPGs https://www.google.com/search?q=browser+based+rpg FPSes here https://poki.com/en/shooting or maybe better a video showing some https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ad5jcXPbNw I know none of them are Edlin Ring, Skyrim, or Call of Duty. One issue with Web games is users's expect them to start qui…

Yes and no. UDP objectively performs better because it prioritizes sending relevant (in the context of real time application) data rather than retrying no longer relevant data (and all the overhead that entails).

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#293

Post by wat10000 » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:08 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #194

Animats wrote: post #186

> Thanks to HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly, browser games are catching up to native ones in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Meta’s Oculus browser already delivers web games that rival native apps in performance. And once WebGPU becomes standard, the differences will be practically invisible. If only. Have you tried Google Earth on Firefox lately? You can't even zoom in and out any more without wai…

> On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason that Uber or Waymo needs to have an "app". Here’s one: I don’t give websites my location or the ability to interrupt me with notifications. Ever. I’ve blocked the browser from doing this entirely. I have Uber and Lyft apps installed and granted those permissions though.

Funny, I blocked notifications from the Uber and Lyft apps because they kept spamming me. And the notifications aren’t all that useful, since I’m actively checking the app whenever something time sensitive is happening anyway.

Location is super useful here, of course.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#294

Post by throwitaway1123 » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:14 AM UTC

gazchop wrote: post #2

I disagree. The problem is more nuanced. A well implemented (native) app is always better than a well implemented web site. The problem is poorly implemented apps which are just UI wrappers hitting dumb APIs or embedding entire web stacks which hit dumb APIs. A well implemented web app isn't much better than that. They don't work offline, they use way more resources than anything native and they leak data like a siev…

> They don't work offline

This isn't true. Offline functionality is the raison d'être for Service Workers. You can run an entire HTTP request router on the client to respond to requests while offline: https://hono.dev/docs/getting-started/service-worker

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#295

Post by andrewflnr » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:22 AM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #261

brookst wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shows why guessing and gut feel are bad basis for opinions. In fact, Apple’s problem was that the PWA serviceworker runs as root, a bad decision made years ago. Enabling Chrome-hosted PWAs means Google gets root on those peoples’ phones. We can still lambast Apple and go all ad hom, but let’s stay factual?

Ok running something like that as root by design is enough of a self own from Apple that I really don't need to say anything more, hahaha

Factual ad hom indeed.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#296

Post by thot_experiment » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:23 AM UTC

chris_pie wrote: post #276

thot_experiment wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out! I wasn't aware this had more or less landed. (though I think my broader point about cross platform support unfortunately still stands, I personally don't care about supporting iOS on my side projects and I'm excited to mess with this)

Support is getting there on the browsers' side, but you need a backend that supports HTTP3+WebTransport - barely any out there

Yup, as I have found out over the last 5 hours. I managed to get a handshake but it's nowhere near the convenience of something like WebSockets. The security circus you have to go through to get even a handshake working is absolutely absurd, all sorts of extremely poorly documented certificate requirements and you'll be lucky to get an error message that helps you in any way. I'm getting ready to give up for the day, I will definitely make a top level HN post if I get a solution working and documented.

Meanwhile https://github.com/achingbrain/webtransport-echo-server this is the best we have for a minimal working node example.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#297

Post by thot_experiment » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

nox101 wrote: post #272

thot_experiment wrote: post #159

I man don't get me wrong, I love the idea of PWAs but this dude is out to lunch. It's so painful making anything complex work cross browser/cross platform. On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You definitely can't Bluetooth outside of Chrome (probably only on Android and Windows too because nothing fun is ever allowed on Macs). Multiplayer games you kind of need UDP. You cannot UDP in th…

Do you need UDP? I see lots of multiplayer browser games. Here's a few https://browsergames.gg/ Google shows me a bunch of RPGs https://www.google.com/search?q=browser+based+rpg FPSes here https://poki.com/en/shooting or maybe better a video showing some https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ad5jcXPbNw I know none of them are Edlin Ring, Skyrim, or Call of Duty. One issue with Web games is users's expect them to start qui…

No you don't need UDP to make a game, but for the sorts of games that I enjoy playing you need UDP.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#298

Post by theK » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:35 AM UTC

brookst wrote: post #255

moffkalast wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The need to remove the capability was informed by the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps to support alternative browser engines that would require building a new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and iPadOS. This rationalization makes zero sense, it's just opening a standalone browser window from a convenient icon shortcut. They could even ignore the manifest.…

Shows why guessing and gut feel are bad basis for opinions. In fact, Apple’s problem was that the PWA serviceworker runs as root, a bad decision made years ago. Enabling Chrome-hosted PWAs means Google gets root on those peoples’ phones. We can still lambast Apple and go all ad hom, but let’s stay factual?

Sounds like something very fixable though. Why is it so difficult for apple to fix the "engineering mistake" and move the PWA process to a less privileged user or even a jail?

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#299

Post by reaperducer » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:36 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #282

panic wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, home-screen web apps on iPhone OS predate third-party apps on the platform. Originally all third-party software was going to be installed this way.

> Originally all third-party software was going to be installed this way. It's off topic, but I don't think this was true once the HTML Weather and Stocks 'widgets' failed on iOS. Anything Apple said publicly was just saving face until their SDK was ready for public consumption.

It was true. I developed iPhone OS web apps during that time.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#300

Post by Spivak » Wed, Jan 01, 2025, 1:40 AM UTC

throwitaway1123 wrote: post #294

gazchop wrote: post #2

I disagree. The problem is more nuanced. A well implemented (native) app is always better than a well implemented web site. The problem is poorly implemented apps which are just UI wrappers hitting dumb APIs or embedding entire web stacks which hit dumb APIs. A well implemented web app isn't much better than that. They don't work offline, they use way more resources than anything native and they leak data like a siev…

> They don't work offline This isn't true. Offline functionality is the raison d'être for Service Workers. You can run an entire HTTP request router on the client to respond to requests while offline: https://hono.dev/docs/getting-started/service-worker

Are you guys okay? Don't get me wrong it's clever, but it's also insane.

If I pitched the idea of having SMB shares work online by shipping a driver that could intercept low level SMB calls and reroute them to a mock SMB server that holds the cache they would have assumed I'd lost it.

Surely the browser could help you a bit more to implement offline sites in a more integrated fashion.