251–260 of 329 posts
Any chance we can get the original title which doesn't sound so childish: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU And if PWA were such a threat to Apple's business then why are they allowed in US.
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And what is stopping Epic from using a PWA today on Android of its just Apple holding them back?
No idea, but as I said it's about the next decade, not today.
(and the HN gods don’t like me now for some unknown reason)
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> do I just hear the arguments again how java is slow vs c++? No, no you don't > the browser is the jvm of a web app, very secure and js engines like V8 is extremely capable And what this has to do with apps and the fact that web apps are universally slow, bloated, underperforming, and require significantly more resources to do the most primitive things than native apps? > you should also make yourself familiar with…
> No, no you don't Yeah, yeah, he does. Not only C/C++ v. Java, but before that ASM v. C/C++. > There will be no competition because lazy people and people who have never seen the world outside their web bubble will simply opt for the cheapest option. This is what most people would consider an opportunity. Get off HN and write competing apps. If these are really "lazy" developers delivering "slow and bloated" apps, y…
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> No, no you don't Yeah, yeah, he does. Not only C/C++ v. Java, but before that ASM v. C/C++. > There will be no competition because lazy people and people who have never seen the world outside their web bubble will simply opt for the cheapest option. This is what most people would consider an opportunity. Get off HN and write competing apps. If these are really "lazy" developers delivering "slow and bloated" apps, y…
> Yeah, yeah, he does. Not only C/C++ v. Java, but before that ASM v. C/C++. Argument from analogy is one of the weakest one can make. Because analogies are always incorrect. Besides, two can play this game. I'm arguing to use cars to get from point A to point B when you're arguing to use horse-driven buggies. > Get off HN and write competing apps. If these are really "lazy" developers delivering "slow and bloated" a…
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You need a competitive browser if you want to convince people to use it. Apple's only distribution scheme for Safari is forcibly pre-installing it on all of their devices. It's not akin to Chrome or Firefox where people deliberately install their app and weigh it against alternatives. You don't get a choice. As a reminder, United States v. Microsoft Corp. was never about IE's market share. It was about the illegal mo…
> You need a competitive browser if you want to convince people to use it. The argument may have worked 10-15 years ago. Since then Chrome has captured majority market share (among other things deploying, clear anticompetitive practices [1]). They now dominate all the standards bodies and shit all over the standards process by shipping whatever they damn please to the sycophantic cheering from the sidelines. So it's…
Given that Chrome isn't shipping ActiveX or Flash, what's the issue? Apple and Mozilla decide how (or if) they want to implement each standard. If there's no demand for the feature, it shouldn't be a problem ignoring it. If icky features like WebUSB and Bluetooth are terrible, users won't notice anyways.
I've daily-drove Firefox for close to 5 years now, but Chromium is simply better-developed in a lot of ways. It integrates better on Linux and doesn't ship with annoying adware that nags you with pop-up modals. I don't want Google's browser engine to be the best, but I don't think I'd be using Firefox today even ignoring compatibility concerns. Safari isn't even an option to me, not that I'd willingly pick WebKit anyways.
> And yes, "only works in Chrome" is a frequent enough appearance to warrant a worry.
Crocodile tears coming from an ecosystem where "only works on iOS" and "only works on Mac" is the default. Apple is not the savior of the free web, and if the openness of the internet relies on their goodwill then it is already lost.
Google's strategy is pressuring Apple to make more capable software. When a user has more freedom in a browser than they do in their hardware's native runtime, something is gravely wrong (and you can't blame the browser).
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Did this just get marked as dupe to pull it off the front page? How outrageous. The link has not been posted before.
It's funny that this post is considered dupes of those 2, but those 2 are not dupes of each other.
Keep in mind the criterion for dupeage: has the story had significant attention yet? One can argue that this story was major enough that half an hour of front page time wasn't significant, even though the thread did get 100 comments.
The second submission, however, spent 16 hours on HN's front page and got over 800 comments. That clearly qualifies as the story having significant attention, meaning that it was both standard and correct to downweight the current submission. The only question is whether it should have been formally marked [dupe] or merely downweighted as a follow-up (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but we don't have precise rules around that.
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Yes. Yes, among other things the point of the app is to look good: be fluid, performant, responsive and conform to the platform look and feel and HIGs. All the things that web apps objectively fail to do.
And if I can't find the app because of the awful app store interface, and if it's stealing my information by demanding permissions that it doesn't need, and if it's showing me ads that I can't block, and if it's bothering me with constant updates, why should I care if it's "fluid"? The goal of software is not to look pretty, it's to be functional. Web apps are more functional than native apps by my metrics. I do not…
Funny how web apps invariably fail in that regard, too.
> Web apps are more functional than native apps by my metrics.
So far you haven't described any metrics
> because I use software to do things.
So do I. And web apps always get in the way of me doing things: they lag, they perform poorly, they break al platform conventions, they hog resources,they can barely display static information without breaking etc.
Kinda funny but when the rubber hit the road they did delete the word “Progressive” from “Profressive Web Apps”. Talk about a complete failure in branding, they should have done that years ago but the PWA pushers had the congenital fault almost all marketers have which is the inability to see themselves the way others see them.
however, at the beginning they tried to force some "progressive" things like responsive design or offline etc. I can understan what they wanted, no need to think of it as self marketing
I like the clarity of websites and we should learn that they can be very powerful: responsive websites, offline functioning websites etc... they can use sooo many web capabilities
I define apps as standalone UX and I use "switch to standalone" instead of "install" (that is what actually happens if someone creates a manifest file which is governed by a draft, not yet standard)
so a website can be implicitly a web app in the sense of rich functionality (responsive, offline) without being used in standalone mode
it will be explicitly a web app if switched to standalone mode from tab mode... this is an important distinction since even if nothing is installed this is a decision from the user to use it from the OS and outside of the browser as a standalone window and on some platforms it may give it some extra rights (local data storage will never be cleared by nice companies like Apple without asking the user, push notifications might be coupled with this decision now or in the future etc)
but I agree, this progressive thing is the past... it actually became the past when browsers gave a shit about what the site ctually functionally can when granting that app button and standalone mode
For me, this shows fear and a sense of insecurity within Apple. They've built their walled garden and are doing whatever they can to protect it. They've probably even convinced users that it's in their interest. Yet, they know there is an inevitability that polished web apps will exist (and that time will come fairly soon, imo), and will match and replace their native counterparts. They also know, it's the correct an…
however, web apps are the future and not the present... we will have them on iOS in 1-2 years in Europe, I dont know when everywhere in the world
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The solution is to improve web app capabilities and security, not to devolve back to platform-specific fiefdoms just because there’s kinks to work out. Disentangling apps from OS-specific environments is how we introduce competition back into computing. Apple and Microsoft are the most valuable companies in the history of earth due to these fiefdoms and it’s about time we got some reversion to the mean.
“Web” as an OS is overbloated, with decades of legacy junk. It was never meant to run applications, and yet it does. The strong indicator for this is that there are only, what, 3 (two sharing common ancestor, so more like 2.5?) non-dead rendering engines, and it’s practically impossible to implement a new one? (Yes, a toy engine is possible, but anything practical is out of reach.) My point is, you can’t introduce co…
linux and windows, then 3x linux derivatives (android, mac, ios)
so we have the linux kernel and windows, we still exist (1% open source)
browsers have the open source chromium kernel plus safari and firefox and some small others
it seems to me browser choice is good enough
I dont mind if google and microsoft engineers all work on chromium together...