Stop pushing the web forward • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#161

Post by unabst » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

An experience is not a function of a feature. The browser does not define the experience -- the web developer does. So to say creating too many tools is bad, if anything, is an attack on the web developer for misusing their tools. For this reason, we shouldn't be able to say navigation transitions are a bad feature. The onus is on the web developer to create a positive experience.

>Do we want the web to be at whatever we push it forward to?

It never became what we pushed it to. A new feature is unusable. Nobody building a critical page can use cutting edge features due to bugs and compatibility, and they are mostly for experimentalists and fiddlers. Only those with deep pockets can do the multi-platform web page which is building multiple web sites just for a handful to have a cutting edge experience, but even this trend is dwindling it seems with the death of Flash.

A new feature, if anything, is an offering. It is a question posed to the web developers by browser developers asking them to examine a new opportunity for new experiences. The web developers then tell the browser developer community whether they love the feature or hate it, and this is how the web has organically evolved.

Therefore, it can only be a good thing that finally all these features are being pushed to production so that all these questions can be posed. So do we love them or hate them? The browser developers focus should be on pushing cutting edge features forward, and not on experiences. Leave that to the professionals, and mock their work if you have to.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#162

Post by rimantas » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #65

AlexandrB wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my opinion, native mobile apps have been always an intermediary and I wouldn't mind seeing all of them going away if some better web app alternative comes along. As primarily a user of mobile apps I would mind. A web app experience is at the mercy of the network I happen to be connected to. In addition, as a user, the "build once, run anywhere" feature of web apps is a disadvantage since it often means that apps…

> A web app experience is at the mercy of the network I happen to be connected to. That's one of many things that web apps have been fixing. It's entirely possible to write an offline-capable web app. > In addition, as a user, the "build once, run anywhere" feature of web apps is a disadvantage since it often means that apps are written with the lowest common denominator in mind and don't quite blend in with the look…

  > It's entirely possible to write an offline-capable web app.

Yeah. It is entirely possible to make web app do a lot of things. Even do them cross-platform. Even to get almost native feel. But when you are done doing it you understand, that going native even on each platform would be faster and cheaper.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#163

Post by Excavator » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:43 PM UTC

rco8786 wrote: post #45

ixtli wrote: post #8

> But why do web developers want navigation transitions? In order to emulate native apps, of course. If we're doing unpopular opinion time, I think this is the real issue that no one wants to talk about. I'm all for whatever feature development the community can standardize. Apple, google, mozilla, and etc. all have smart people working for them and when they cooperate things seem to work out fine. The problem is try…

I think this is shortsighted. In 5-10 years browsers will be more Virtual Machine than Web Browser. You can almost argue that they already are. As browsers and phones get more and more performant, the idea of emulating native apps in the browser won't have the performance stigma attached to it. This same thing played out with Java et. al. It was dismissed for being non-performant when compared to C/C++(aka native cod…

You might be interested in the in the works WebAssembly, if you haven't heard of it already.

https://blog.mozilla.org/luke/2015/06/17/webassembly/

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#164

Post by pc86 » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

> here is an artist’s impression of the modern browser

> screenshot of Microsoft Word in a 14-year old unsupported OS on what is most likely a 1024x768 screen with all toolbars activated

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#165

Post by frik » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

What's wrong with that site?

quirksmode.org used to be a great resource but it stopped being updated 10 years ago when IE 6 was still the "thing". Nowadays, http://caniuse.com replaced it.

So quirksmode transformed to a rant blog, like this one we had on HN three months ago: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/05/web_vs_nativ...

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#166

Post by marssaxman » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #109

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know PPK and his work? He's been at the cutting edge of web-standards and implementations for at least 12 years if my memory serves me correctly. >And you'll get exactly what you want. // If he wants to avoid the web being badly negatively effected by short term views of current browser companies and standards bodies then he won't get what he wants by sticking his head in the sand and ignoring the direction he…

> I find it funny that web pages are trying to be native apps and many mobile apps are shipping when they're ostensibly just web pages. Which provides some insight into what's missing from the web. It's almost good enough for most companies. They just need a little something extra so that they can "own the experience." But soon the browsers will catch up and then websites will be able to own your experience, too.

I really don't want them to "own the experience." I want their brochures to stay nicely sandboxed in a browser where they don't invade my computer and try to tell me what I can do with it.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#167

Post by z3t4 » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:56 PM UTC

Even though I'm a bit butt hurt about the new syntactic changes to JavaScript, I very exited about the browser development.

Hardware accelerated Canvas 2d graphics and Web-sockets are the two I'm most excited about because they are now stable across most browsers.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#168

Post by azatris » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:57 PM UTC

aquilaFiera wrote: post #116

cwyers wrote: post #104

I think this is the key: > The moratorium would hit Chrome much harder than it would the other browsers, since it’s Google that is proposing most of the new features nowadays. That may not be entirely fair, but it’s an unavoidable consequence of Chrome’s current position as the top browser — not only in market share, but also in supported features. Also, the fact that Google’s documentation ranges from lousy to non-e…

I wouldn't categorize Google as the leader anymore. Mozilla and Microsoft have caught up and are as much leading the charge as Google is. Four years ago I would have agreed but four years ago we needed Google to push the browser forward.

Do you have any growth statistics as reference?

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#169

Post by GrinningFool » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 7:05 PM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #30

ixtli wrote: post #8

> But why do web developers want navigation transitions? In order to emulate native apps, of course. If we're doing unpopular opinion time, I think this is the real issue that no one wants to talk about. I'm all for whatever feature development the community can standardize. Apple, google, mozilla, and etc. all have smart people working for them and when they cooperate things seem to work out fine. The problem is try…

I'm sorry but how would making browsers the operating system cause the incompatability problems to reappear? I think this is massively ignoring the realities: - there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment - There's a standard for most things happening in a browser, which means that things look pixel-perfectly the same on a huge amount of browsers. Differences among current…

> There's a standard for most things happening in a browser, which means that things look pixel-perfectly the same on a huge amount of browsers he browser is basically what the JVM tried to be, a write once work anywhere solution that is pretty well sandboxed. It's miles better than pretty much every other cross-platform piece of tooling in existence.

That's a good theory. My experience as a consumer of web sites across chrome, firefox, chrome on mobile, and firefox on mobile leaves me with a perspective more aligned with reality than theory. The same pages vary widely across these platforms. It's not uncommon for form fields to be illegible on one or more of them, layout is different, readability is different.

Maybe once we get that little problem ironed out (whether it be people building websites badly or things aren't as compatible as they should be, I don't know) we can talk about taking it further...

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#170

Post by pyre » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 7:07 PM UTC

ectoplasm wrote: post #107

ForHackernews wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only cross platform UI experiment that has 'worked' on any significant level. Users do not care about cross-platform compatibility, at all. They only care that it works on their platform. As developers, we should be cheering for a diversity of widely-popular, mutually-incompatible platforms because there will be more work for developers to port the iOS version to Android to Windows, etc. The only people who sho…

> Users do not care about cross-platform compatibility, at all. I've heard that some users have both a phone and a laptop.

No one has a laptop anymore. We're in the "post PC" era, haven't you heard?