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Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

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Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#101

Post by samspenc »

windmark wrote: post #98
rco8786 wrote: post #91

What am I missing here? Web browsers are already GUIs, and any backend with an api supports it.

Reading the “How Does it Work?” section of the readme, I interpret it as WebUI being a way of embedding a web view into your existing program, being a sort of proxy for the existing browser of the system. https://github.com/webui-dev/webui#how-does-it-work

Don't frameworks like Electron (and Tauri) already allow us to do this today?

I couldn't tell from their docs what makes their project unique compared to these existing and more popular solutions.

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#102

Post by kaba0 »

Xeamek wrote: post #95
kaba0 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost like 3d rendering is vertices and shading is an embarrassingly parallel problem which is quite trivial to make faster by throwing more hardware at it. General layouting/text rendering, etc are not like that, and there is not even a “free” improvement anymore with single-threaded CPU speeds plateauing.

Yes, modern computers are just too slow to handle layouting a facebook page, nothing can be done.

Do you have any form of proof that layouting is a bottleneck anywhere?

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#103

Post by hit8run »

apatheticonion wrote: post #99

I wish that Apple and Microsoft would work together towards making it easier for people to make cross platform desktop applications. It's largely uneconomical for most companies to develop and maintain separate apps using two different teams with minimally interchangeable skills. Tools like Electron are, essentially, not a choice I also wish that wasm would come sooner so we could have more memory and CPU efficient (…

Isn’t that what Flutter is solving?

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#104

Post by nanaian »

apatheticonion wrote: post #99

I wish that Apple and Microsoft would work together towards making it easier for people to make cross platform desktop applications. It's largely uneconomical for most companies to develop and maintain separate apps using two different teams with minimally interchangeable skills. Tools like Electron are, essentially, not a choice I also wish that wasm would come sooner so we could have more memory and CPU efficient (…

Wasm threads via SharedArrayBuffer have been a thing for like 5 years. In Rust you can use wasm-bindgen-rayon, for instance. DOM access is and has always been easily achieved through imports. It's performant, too: https://youtu.be/4KtotxNAwME

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#105

Post by Xeamek »

kaba0 wrote: post #102
Xeamek wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, modern computers are just too slow to handle layouting a facebook page, nothing can be done.

Do you have any form of proof that layouting is a bottleneck anywhere?

You were the one who said that layouting is much harder problem then 3d rendering...

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#106

Post by croes »

zamadatix wrote: post #90
croes wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck running you GUI from know in a browser in ten years or maybe even five. Not to mention that WebGUIs are slow compared to native ones. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933

Browsers have extremely good backwards compatibility, five or ten years should really not net you any problems. They do carry quite a bit of bloat however, though so do most native toolkits these days.

For old features yes, for new ones it depends.

https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs

And there could be changes because of security concerns like with alert (), prompt() and confirm().

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#107

Post by kaba0 »

Xeamek wrote: post #105
kaba0 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any form of proof that layouting is a bottleneck anywhere?

You were the one who said that layouting is much harder problem then 3d rendering...

It is a much harder problem, but it is working just fine on even low-end mobile phones with the majority of websites.

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#108

Post by Turing_Machine »

Xeamek wrote: post #79
Turing_Machine wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> et they struggle with rendering websites which comes down to presenting some good looking text. Umm... you're putting the blame on the wrong thing here, dude. > because some front dev crambed some 'cool' paralax effect onto it, As I said.

You mean that the fornt end devs aren't actually responsible for the rendering, but the browser devs are? Would you apply the same logic to game optimization? That's it's not the responsibility of game devs, and instead we can shift all the blame to the gpu sdk team?

> You mean that the fornt end devs aren't actually responsible for the rendering, but the browser devs are?

Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. My position is that the browser is fast enough, and that any slowness is exactly the fault of the site devs. You said the browser wasn't fast enough.

Previous poster: The reality is that web is fast enough

You: No its fuckin not.

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#109

Post by squarefoot »

Technically interesting, but no thanks. Imagine a Firefox user downloading the latest LibreOffice and being greeted with the warning "Better run through Chrome", or writing a dashboard on a small embedded system, and the memory footprint goes like 20x because now you need a browser in between in place of native controls. The idea is interesting but there are so many caveats, and the industry is famous for choosing the simplest and cheapest development methods rather than the most efficient ones.

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#110

Post by Turing_Machine »

samspenc wrote: post #101
windmark wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the “How Does it Work?” section of the readme, I interpret it as WebUI being a way of embedding a web view into your existing program, being a sort of proxy for the existing browser of the system. https://github.com/webui-dev/webui#how-does-it-work

Don't frameworks like Electron (and Tauri) already allow us to do this today? I couldn't tell from their docs what makes their project unique compared to these existing and more popular solutions.

Electron bundles a full installation of Chrome into every application.

WebUI uses whatever browser (or browser component) is already present on your system.

That's a big difference!

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