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Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

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Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#131

Post by pjmlp »

jasode wrote: post #98
pjmlp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... TCPIP, DNS routing.. Also known as Ethernet protocols, nothing to do with "The Web".

I thought I was clear that I'm not using the traditional definition of "web" but to explain what "the web" has become . It's about the evolution of how society sees the web and not about what its original purpose is. Dropbox uses html and http. Drew Houston and his team are not going to submit an RFC so that the internet has a new protocol and port "dropbox://myaddressoffiles:8675". No, Dropbox the application will j…

Users don't care about networking protocols as long as the Dropbox application is able to synchronize their documents.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#132

Post by dj-wonk »

baldfat wrote: post #112
the8472 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at a site like YouTube today. And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback. Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer. There even are addons to export YT playlists to VLC and stream them. pdfjs is great. but every 3rd scientific paper I read tends to be som…

shhhhssss there is no such thing as youtube-dl! I believe that the tool should be like Fight Club or it gets noticed and gets shut down through a drawn out war of changing code and apis.

To modify the Fight Club rules to ensure X (whatever topic you mention) does not get discussed:

  1. There is no X.
  2. There are no comments about X.
  3. There are no comments about comments about X.
  4. (recur away)
Oh, wait. This sounds like censorship.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#133

Post by onion2k »

kyriakos wrote: post #66
onion2k wrote: post #5

Unless you're making something that needs really good performance (3D gaming for example) building a hybrid app wins every time. Something based on Cordova (eg PhoneGap, Ionic) with Crosswalk can get you to about 90% of the performance of a native app, with about 1/2 of the development time because it's all built with web technology. 90% is easily good enough for most applications. Cordova wraps a uiWebView in some b…

crosswalk adds 58mb of weight on your app though and works on android only.

That's not been a problem for me, but if it is you can separate the x86 and Arm builds so it only half as much for each one.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#134

Post by blub »

shawnreilly wrote: post #39

It does not matter what platform you choose (web or mobile), bad developers develop bad software. For every horribly designed, slow, bloated website you find, you can likely find a similar horribly designed, slow, bloated native app. I'm sure you've heard of garbage in garbage out. I view development as a craft and like most crafts, not everyone has the same level of skill. This does not reflect on the platform peopl…

Many companies and teams had a "web hammer" and went looking for things to nail even when that made no sense. At the peak of the web frenzy, web apps were going to kill desktop apps, and one could feel the pity when web devs were talking about desktop and mobile apps. And now... someone finally stops and thinks that maybe it's not such a great idea to turn everything into a web app.

When a group of individuals takes such a strong position and they are proven to be wrong, I personally think some crow eating is due :-)

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#135

Post by Fr0styMatt8 »

fizk wrote: post #42

Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…

It's interesting that you mention YouTube, because the thing that finally convinced me that a 'web app' could be indistinguishable from a native app was YouTube's Leanback interface (YouTube TV). Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/tv

Video player functionality aside (I understand the complaints), that thing full-screened just feels like a native app.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#136

Post by jasode »

pjmlp wrote: post #131
jasode wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I was clear that I'm not using the traditional definition of "web" but to explain what "the web" has become . It's about the evolution of how society sees the web and not about what its original purpose is. Dropbox uses html and http. Drew Houston and his team are not going to submit an RFC so that the internet has a new protocol and port "dropbox://myaddressoffiles:8675". No, Dropbox the application will j…

Users don't care about networking protocols as long as the Dropbox application is able to synchronize their documents.

Exactly!

The "web" as in Tim Berners-Lee(TBL) "world wide web" is http+html which is "documents".

Saying TBL-web is "best as a document platform" makes perfect sense. It was defined that way therefore, use it that way. It's tautology.

Back in 1993, if we want to say "X is best though of as a network app platform" we'd have to use the word "internet" instead of "web" for "X" to be conceptually pure and technically correct (the best kind of correct.).

But now we have things like Dropbox (and thousands of other "web apps"). Dropbox runs on "http".

Dropbox "syncs". Syncing is an app. Dropbox is an app. Dropbox runs on http. Http is "the web". Apps run on the web. The web is platform for apps. That's the reality of where we are today.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#137

Post by kozak »

brudgers wrote: post #82

Sure it's just me anecdotally, but I don't care about native apps versus web apps. I care about where the ship takes me not the arrangement of its deck chairs. I'll use the command line...or the address/search box...if it gets me what I want. Good user interaction and great functionality subsume widget chrome and when it comes to native versus web experience please feel free to do something else on my behalf whenever…

There's a big market for ships with nice deck chair arrangements.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#138

Post by pswenson »

fizk wrote: post #42

Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…

sadly and inexplicably, youtube still uses flash for video on the desktop...

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#139

Post by thomasfoster96 »

castell wrote: post #76
thomasfoster96 wrote: post #30

Perhaps what we really should be thinking is that 90% of applications can, in theory, be made using either web standards, native or a mix of both. Unfortunately lots of websites and web apps are not very well developed. They serve bloated HTML that hasn't been minified, let alone compressed. The page is unresponsive or blank until a dozen JavaScript files have been loaded. Hardly anything is cached. jQuery is loaded…

> Sure, you can't write a great 60 fps first person shooter game for the web you can, you know WebGL is hardware accelerated and there is Asm.js - even the Unreal game engine runs in Firefox and Chrome.

I doubt you'd get a very good, highly detailed game running at 60fps with WebGL and asm.js today. Nothing comparable to what you'd get running well on a console. Maybe in another couple of years, but not today, and by then we might have non-web platforms doing 4K 60fps with ease.

But a lot of games do run quite well using WebGL. Just not the jaw-droppingly realistic ones.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#140

Post by datashovel »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #114
datashovel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None taken. It's probably not worth arguing who is right or wrong since none of us can reasonably assume we know what the future will be, but I will say that in general (1) diversity in ecosystems is good. (2) Monopolies are bad. Given only these two basic assumptions I think it's obvious that there should / will be a push for more diversity in mobile, and thus a larger number of platforms to develop for. This can on…

> It's probably not worth arguing who is right or wrong since none of us can reasonably assume we know what the future will be, but I will say that in general (1) diversity in ecosystems is good. (2) Monopolies are bad. Diversity is good, but too much diversity can be detrimental. A one-mobile-OS world is a terrible thing, since there's no need to push forward and improve. A two-mobile-OS world is better, as long as…

In my crazy future I hope there will eventually be 100's of legitimate mobile OSes.

One of the reasons this would be possible is because the responsibility of app development theoretically wouldn't be aligned vertically with the company that developed the OS, or with some platform that company is responsible for developing.

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