Web apps are better than no apps • Hacker News Board

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#171

Post by Avshalom » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #152

wackget wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

It occurs to me that there exists a fairly elegant UI trick to hide this: RiscOS had no save or load dialogs, everything was drag and drop to or from the file browser.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#172

Post by skydhash » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 8:52 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #108

coldtea wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DOM is plenty fast. Most web apps use it for what it wasn't meant to do, in an inefficient matter, with useless rerenders and overhead.

Let me clarify: the DOM is fast _at what it does_. But in order to truly serve things like web apps rather than documents it needs to have primitives like list virtualization. It doesn't, so people end up using needlessly complex JavaScript frameworks that drag down performance.

> But in order to truly serve things like web apps rather than documents it needs to have primitives like list virtualization.

Why not create a UI system, like X Window over the web (I know X can be done over the network) specifically for web apps? Solve the issue at the root and leave the DOM to documents.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#173

Post by WeAddValue » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #60

afavour wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this really bugs me because it leads people down the path of WASM craziness when the language is rarely the problem. Most web apps are slow because the DOM is slow.

The DOM is plenty fast. Most web apps use it for what it wasn't meant to do, in an inefficient matter, with useless rerenders and overhead.

This! Call it once with a string containing 457 elements and the DOM is blazing fast. Call it 457 times to create an element and the DOM is slow.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#174

Post by WeAddValue » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #172

afavour wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me clarify: the DOM is fast _at what it does_. But in order to truly serve things like web apps rather than documents it needs to have primitives like list virtualization. It doesn't, so people end up using needlessly complex JavaScript frameworks that drag down performance.

> But in order to truly serve things like web apps rather than documents it needs to have primitives like list virtualization. Why not create a UI system, like X Window over the web (I know X can be done over the network) specifically for web apps? Solve the issue at the root and leave the DOM to documents.

Or just use htmx.org

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#175

Post by a257 » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

jsunderland323 wrote: post #169

Atotalnoob wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use Workers API and spawn another JavaScript thread

Well then you’re back to the bridge problem. postMessage is crazy slow. There are some problems where parallelization will outperform the ipc cost with postMessage but those problems are few and far between. I haven’t dove into the new web GPU api but it does look kinda promising (shared memory is hard, so I’m apprehensive). I’m sure some of these things will get solved in the long run but for the time being, the bot…

Transferable objects have been part of the spec for a while now, making it possible to send data back and forth contexts with no copying.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/transferable-objects-light...

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#176

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #101

TeMPOraL wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webdevs seem to have a blind spot around UI. Plenty of end-user apps - like music players - and websites - like e-commerce stores - tend to have compute-intensive UIs . They may not look compute-intensive for a dev on a beefy machine, playing with mockups and toy loads, but they absolutely become noticeable compute hogs on real machines with real loads. And by "real loads" I really mean just more than two dozen items…

My company has several tables in our UI whose API endpoints simply query for all records in that table without pagination. hundreds of rows are loaded into a table plugin, even if you'll never get past the first page

That's... good. Hundreds of rows is a trivial amount, so unless they're expensive to generate on the backend and/or meaningfully large, it should be a non-issue. The question is, what is the page size in the UI, and why is it less than "hundreds of rows"?

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#177

Post by orangea » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 11:07 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #152

wackget wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

IMO the solution is to give users the tools to run apps in a sandbox without forcing them to or making it the default. If an operating system like macos were to ship with a user-friendly UI to change what a given app has access to, then even relatively non-technical users might decide to e.g. turn off WhatsApp's access to various things if they happen to read a news article about the app's data collection.

In addition if an OS provides a way for sandbox settings of apps to be changed, then something like "ublock origin for the OS" could be created, where someone maintains a list of what capabilities should be granted to various apps, and users can just install something once and forget about it to harden their system.

Most users trust most of the apps installed on their computer, but might have a few things that they are suspicious of — such as things they have to install for school or work. Providing a way for users to restrict the capabilities of specific apps when they feel like they need it could be valuable.

Linux already effectively has this because it has stuff like user namespaces and better support for controlling other processes using ptrace than other OSes. This enables users to use things like proot and bubblewrap to apply sandboxing when needed.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#178

Post by joshspankit » Wed, Sep 20, 2023, 1:28 AM UTC

jwells89 wrote: post #119

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…

> 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. I see this as more of a failing on the part of desktop OSes than anything. I know a lot of more technically inclined folks are used to the programs they run having access to all the…

> I see this as more of a failing on the part of desktop OSes than anything.

I agree, and the reasons are ones that I think are also a failing:

- Sandboxing is used by OSs to take control back from users (whether that’s stopping them from building their own non-brand system or stopping them from ripping bit-perfect copies of copyright audio)

- Proper sandboxing is not implemented because it can be used to circumvent the anti-piracy measures that app developers use (specifically offline-friendly native apps). If all data can be wiped, so can the record of the trial expiration, for example.

- The commercial OS makers want a “no one can do it except us” policy and it’s been shown time and time again that any amount of “except us” becomes an attack vector.

- Clawing back permissiveness either requires a lot of expensive dev time or breaks older software (or both) and they don’t seem to be prioritizing users when going down that road.

And as much as iOS is becoming the standard for how to sandbox apps, did everyone know that iOS apps can communicate with each other (and persist data even after an uninstall) through Safari’s local storage/cookies?

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#179

Post by nsonha » Wed, Sep 20, 2023, 1:36 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #133

nsonha wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are saying if they have say an iphone and an android (tablet?), the same app should behave the same. Contrary to you, some people could not care less about "consistency" of different apps that have different UIs and do different things anyway.

Yes, we have different interfaces on the web already, and nobody is complaining that the Gmail login button looks different from the Facebook login button on the web.

to be fair there are a lot of those people who would not shut up about "native" html and "use the platform". Anyone develops for more than one platforms knows that platform is always the first thing to be abstracted away

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#180

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 20, 2023, 1:48 AM UTC

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #150

joshmanders wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leave tech world and look at what people have. Most iPhone users have Windows machines.

I'm not talking about windows and iPhones though, iPhone users are buying iPads, why would they buy an android tablet? If anything, it's tech world that has less brand loyalty. I have an apple, windows, and android. The average tech user though? They're probably going all in on one

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