201–210 of 211 posts
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Can a single webpage address & use more than 4gb of ram nowadays? I was filling 16gb of ram with a single Ableton live session in 2011.
Via electron I’m sure it could. In the main browser it’s probably best to cap usage to avoid having buggy pages consume everything. Anything heavy like a video editor you’d rather install as an electron app for deeper system access and such.
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I'm a seasoned developer and I frequently come across OSS projects where I spend half an hour or more in " how the fuck do I actually use this "-land. A lot of developers need to take the mindset of writing the documentation for their non-tech grandma from the ground up.
Or they can just, y'know, not do that. Because they don't owe you, or anyone, anything.
Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…
To be fair, probably most of us here on HN write software to put food on the table. Don’t pooh-pooh our careers.
Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…
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> For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser I understand it was just an example, but you'd be surprised how far browsers have come along with technologies lik…
Haven't used VidStudio but Pikimov is definitely worth a mention too: https://pikimov.com/
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> But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language) Does it? Have you compared a web app written in a sufficiently low level language with a desktop app?
Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. Even fairly decent-looking ones, not your Doom or Quake! And if we're talking about simple GUI apps, you can run them in 10 megabytes or maybe even less. It's cheating a bit as the OS libraries are already loaded - but they're loaded anyway if you use the browser too, so it's not like you can shave off of that.
What about in QML, which uses Web technologies like CSS, JS and even basic HTML? The whole KDE Plasma 6 desktop is built around these technologies now and I (and many others) consider it light and high-performance.
If you saddle up those technologies in the full browser everything then it will get larger, yes, but nothing requires you to do this, just as nothing requires providing your app as a full-fat Fedora install when a distroless container would have sufficed.
Plain Javascript can be very fast and still come at relatively low resource demands and the same is true of HTML and CSS. Many "plain desktop-native" applications often end up reinventing their own variants of HTML and CSS in the course of designing the U/I anyways.
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Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. Even fairly decent-looking ones, not your Doom or Quake! And if we're talking about simple GUI apps, you can run them in 10 megabytes or maybe even less. It's cheating a bit as the OS libraries are already loaded - but they're loaded anyway if you use the browser too, so it's not like you can shave off of that.
> Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. What about in QML, which uses Web technologies like CSS, JS and even basic HTML? The whole KDE Plasma 6 desktop is built around these technologies now and I (and many others) consider it light and high-performance. If you saddle up those technologies in the full browser everything then it will get larger, yes, but nothing…
Qt is much lighter than your Chromium-based stacks but all the waste kind of adds up.
"just as nothing requires providing your app as a full-fat Fedora install when a distroless container would have sufficed" Containers are hungrier than running stuff on bare metal...
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> Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. What about in QML, which uses Web technologies like CSS, JS and even basic HTML? The whole KDE Plasma 6 desktop is built around these technologies now and I (and many others) consider it light and high-performance. If you saddle up those technologies in the full browser everything then it will get larger, yes, but nothing…
It's better, but it's still quite bloated, to be honest. Linux is generally more memory-hungry than Windows because of how modular it is, and having no Win32 equivalent really hurts. Although they've started doing UI in React Native over there too... Qt is much lighter than your Chromium-based stacks but all the waste kind of adds up. "just as nothing requires providing your app as a full-fat Fedora install when a di…
> Containers are hungrier than running stuff on bare metal...
Containers are tremendously lightweight compared to VM. You might as well point out that running a full multiuser security-protected OS like Linux is hungrier than running on bare metal with DOS too. It's just as true, and even proportionally as true.
In any event a full Fedora container with all packages installed is going to be tremendously larger than a distroless hello-world "built" around Alpine, for instance, even though they both use container technologies. Same applies to Web technologies, you can certainly go and easily add a lot of waste using them but they are not themselves inherently wasteful.
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> design a universal app engine You've reminded me of the XKCD comic about standards: https://xkcd.com/927/ Do you really want a universal app engine? If you don't have a good reason for ignoring platform guidelines (as many games do), then don't. The best applications on any platform are the ones that embrace the platform's conventions and quirks. I get why businesses will settle for mediocre, but for personal proje…
Platforms and app engines are orthogonal concerns. I agree that platform guidelines are worth preserving, and the web as a platform solves it by hijacking the rectangle that the native platform yields to it. Any app engine could do the same thing.
That's a terrible solution that preserves nothing. Try using a screen reader with an app rendered onto a rectangle.
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Or they can just, y'know, not do that. Because they don't owe you, or anyone, anything.
Of course, but presumably if you're launching something you want people to adopt it so spend some time on documentation.