Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s time to kill the web app

blog.plan99.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 717 posts

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#21

Post by disordinary »

SwellJoe wrote: post #12

I find this unconvincing. Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average). "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. "Web apps are impossible to secure." Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is im…

Yep, also on speed: it seems to me that the microsoft office suite for instance slows down every generation despite only having minor improvements and not actually being that different now than from 95. The nature of developers is that they will use whatever resources that they have. Faster computers don't necessarily mean faster applications but faster software development cycles from bigger teams with less need for the discipline and rigor that was required before.

In some ways we've traded speed for productivity.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#22

Post by leeoniya »

the biggest security blunder of the web platform is allowing third party domains to inject code into https pages, which completely violates the trust that https is meant to establish.

and it's here to stay, folks! because the entire trillion-dollar ad industry is built upon it, vacuuming up data about users across the internet.

a huge amount of security and privacy issues would vanish overnight simply by requiring same origin.

the fact that my banking backend has third-party metrics scripts injected [without uMatrix/uBlock Origin] is unforgivable.

and of course half the web is broken without allowing 2 or 3 CDNs or cloudflare to track me everywhere i go.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#23

Post by csours »

Magic Sorcerer Hat Mode: Part 2 is going to detail something like Plan 9, where you don't have to worry about where the disk is, or the information feed comes from; where authorization and authentication are baked into services - not tacked on later; where UI forms are composable, etc etc.

My surmise is that all of these things can be accomplished now with careful choices of how you do things.

And if you aren't Microsoft or Google, maybe you don't need to make Word or Excel on the web?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#24

Post by bitexploder »

mikebenfield wrote: post #20

It's probably not realistic, but I would love to see the web be completely thrown out and replaced with something reasonable. I write a decent amount of native code. I write Rust, C, and x64 assembly. I think I'm pretty good at this stuff. But the web is too much for me. Any time I think I'd like to do something with the web and sit down to learn, it's completely overwhelming. I've never been able to put together a c…

That's cause the web is full of hype. Try Python Flask. A three line Python function and you are going. No magic. Just request and response. It is easy. Bang out a model class and read the SQLAlchemy tutorial. The web and RDBMS with just enough magic. Screw HTML front ends. Write the ugliest HTML you want. Never spend time in HTML. Make your app / idea work. Get your data right. Front ends and modern front end tech stacks are an unholy time suck that offer little for hobby or small apps.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#25

Post by modeless »

There's one big problem with killing the web: Apple's App Store. You can make all the new platforms you want, but they will never be allowed to replace the App Store for distribution.

The web is the only platform that can do distribution outside of the App Store on iOS and Apple will never allow a second one. That means your platform can't have hyperlinks between apps, can't have a no-install experience, can't do just-in-time code delivery. Without those features you can't replace the web.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#26

Post by mwcampbell »

zdkl wrote: post #18
mwcampbell wrote: post #15

What about the fact that the Web platform isn't owned by any one company, but is supported (to varying degrees) by every major native platform? A shiny new app platform won't have that. That's important.

In theory indeed. In practice there's 3 vendors and the standard defining organisation represents commercial interests in the platform, not you.

On balance, and having read the whole article now, I think you're right. I shouldn't have reacted before reading the whole thing and really considering it.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#27

Post by vvanders »

avaer wrote: post #19

I sympathize with the sentiment, but the web app only sucks if you're using the stuff that sucks. Like any technology with decades of evolution it has a thick sediment of peat. Half of Javascript, half of Windows, even half of *nix is garbage you should never use, but it's all there because old things would stop working without it. It's just that the web has a very low barrier to entry and very high reach, so the com…

Having written things targeting WASM, when you can provide me an environment like Visual Studio that has breakpoints(including data) and a debugging I can step then we can talk.

Until then WASM is cool, but not nearly as productive for C++ as the native platforms.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#30

Post by chickenfries »

mikebenfield wrote: post #20

It's probably not realistic, but I would love to see the web be completely thrown out and replaced with something reasonable. I write a decent amount of native code. I write Rust, C, and x64 assembly. I think I'm pretty good at this stuff. But the web is too much for me. Any time I think I'd like to do something with the web and sit down to learn, it's completely overwhelming. I've never been able to put together a c…

What did you try to do to learn web development? I'm sure there was something you could do to change your approach, if you're really capable of learning how to build complicated, networked GUI applications in Rust and C, you must be able to grok the basics of web architecture.

Honestly these comments that we should throw away the web are just as ignorant as people who think we should just throw away all of our C code.

Post reply on HN