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Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

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Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#351

Post by nostrademons »

nivla wrote: post #305
pjc50 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube is an interesting choice of example, since in a way it's "just documents" - those documents happen to be video, and are surrounded by hyperlinks to other video's pages. The real achievement here was cutting through the intellectual property thicket so that everyone could have an in-browser video player in HTML5. The first site I ever saw that used Javascript to produce a useful application rather than annoyin…

>why does everyone use youtube rather than hosting videos on their own sites? Unpacking this question will show the obstacles that "redecentralisation" faces Two reasons: Bandwidth and Speed. Google has contracts with most major ISP's for caching Youtube videos. This gives them access to the best CDN money can buy! No matter how awesome or powerful your current datacenter/CDN is, it still wouldn't be able to match th…

It's more than that. There's also legal liability (very few people would be comfortable hosting the amount of pirated content that appears on YouTube, nor would they have personal bandwidth for DMCA takedown requests), discoverability (YouTube recommends content you've never seen before, intelligently...by definition a personal site can't do this), and search (which only works when you have enough content to be worthwhile to search over). All of the algorithms used for the latter two points require a good amount of data, so Google gets large economies of scale there.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#352

Post by orthecreedence »

I agree that if you have the resources to build something on native, go right ahead. But as someone who has very limited time to work on a passion project (https://turtl.it), I will be damned if I split up my efforts writing different apps for iOS, Android, and desktop. Thanks to things like Cordova, node-webkit, and various other tools, I can write my interface/logic once and run it everywhere (with a bit of wrapping).

No, it will not be perfect. Yes a native app would perform better. But I don't think my users (who continually ask me for a mobile app) are really going to care that much if the page transitions jump a tiny bit. And once Safari pulls its head out of its ass and supports AES-GCM in its WebCrypto implementation, I can do fully-native crypto in my app, and the largest performance hit goes away.

HTML5 is the poor person's write once, run everywhere. Although not perfect, it continually strives to be better. It enables someone like me, who can only work nights and weekends, to build something useful and usable for a lot of people in a minimal amount of time. If people don't like Turtl mobile because it doesn't have seamless transitions, they can use Evernote instead and have their plaintext data leaked all over the web.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#353

Post by rockdoe »

stephenr wrote: post #318
rockdoe wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's saying "local file access" in a very strange way, i.e. he wants out of the browser sandbox.

When did having my own data stored in regular files become "strange"? If the data is tied to a browser, how do I back it up/save a copy of it? How do I persist it when the browsers local settings/cache are cleared (either by clearing or eg. when the OS is installed)?

When did having my own data stored in regular files become "strange"?

I meant your wording was strange. I had to reread it several times to understand what you meant, and I think the parent poster also didn't understand what you meant.

If the data is tied to a browser, how do I back it up/save a copy of it?

In Firefox, back up your profile.

How do I persist it when the browsers local settings/cache are cleared (either by clearing or eg. when the OS is installed)?

If you clear it intentionally then why should it persist?

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#355

Post by weland »

jasode wrote: post #237
weland wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time electronic computers became widespread, very few non-electronic computers remained -- and few of them were human. The term was easy to repurpose. But the World Wide Web is very much here and very present. > To the layman, both actions are "surfing the web". To the layman, a server and a computer are the same thing, and yet calling Apache a computer is incorrect.

>The term was easy to repurpose. But the World Wide Web is very much here and very present. And educated programmers call various text styles, "fonts" even though technically, a font is actually a specific size, and specific weight of a "typeface". The "font" is a subset of "typeface". Even though typefaces still exist, almost everyone uses the word "font." And programmers will also call SQL (without CTE) a "programm…

> Today... if we have Dropbox/GoogleMaps/Sudoku/etc, with millions of users as reality, what does "web" in "web app" really mean? The "http+html" has become a universal transport mechanism (with some apps even tunneling through http to do interesting things.).

HTTP + HTML does not include "the whole Internet stack, TCP/IP, DNS routing etc.", as you mentioned above.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#356

Post by na85 »

pjmlp wrote: post #229
insertnickname wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is HD DVD better than Blu-Ray?

Maybe because it doesn't use Java for some people, :)

"uses Java" tends to be synonymous with "bloated and poorly performant", so I can understand that preference.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#357

Post by ucaetano »

drostie wrote: post #283
oldmanjay wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel you made a point by listing services that exist only by breaking the law to exist as somehow related to business reality? Making your money by trampling the rights of others isn't exactly sustainable. The only way you have a point is to be rampantly intellectually dishonest, or ignorant of reality. Neither option is great, so charitably, it's best to assume you know this stuff and you're just trolling. Al…

The violation of IP is a similar problem for torrents and YouTube alike. The "4th option" is that you've got the causality completely backwards in your head: it just happens to be the case that the cultures where distributed tooling became important were the ones where it was necessary to promote an "all information is free" mindset, not that it's necessarily a part of distributed tooling that you take that mindset.…

> The violation of IP is a similar problem for torrents and YouTube alike.

Not at all, YT solved it many years ago with ContentID.

Now imagine having to install all the plethora of apps on every device, one for videos, one for music, 500 for different types of documents, etc. Instead, you install a (hopefully) standard-compliant browser, and done.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#358

Post by pbreit »

I mostly agree but the one category that does NOT need to be native is pure (text-heavy) content (i.e., news sites). In fact, it's beneficial to be web in order to support easy linking, distribution and discovery.

Also, while I agree with the "home page" question, the author makes no mention of the other important criteria: are notifications important?

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#359

Post by yellowapple »

pavlov wrote: post #254
thekingshorses wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with PPK, but sorry to say this: you are just throwing garbage. > There's nothing more annoying to a mobile user than an "app" that takes 10 seconds to start up Try this on your mobile browser http://hn.premii.com/ Now download this. Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn Or iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435 And play with it. Download top 5 native H…

I don't see the point of comparing HN apps. HN is a website and doesn't do anything meaningful as an app. Android 5.x has less than 10% marketshare, and 4.x seems quite resilient in low-end devices. It's going to take a while until you can build hybrid apps exclusively for Lollipop. If you don't think mobile browsers have performance issues, you must use high-end devices exclusively.

> Android 5.x has less than 10% marketshare, and 4.x seems quite resilient in low-end devices.

Folks were saying the same exact thing about 2.x when 4.x came out. By the time 6.x comes out, everyone will be yammering on about how 5.x marketshare is still strong and "seems quite resilient in low-end devices", blissfully ignoring the point in time when 4.x - like 2.x - fades out of view as it's increasingly ignored by app developers.

Meanwhile, in the actual low-end space, you have things like FirefoxOS where there's zero difference between "web" and "native" because "native" apps are just web apps with special hooks for things like cameras and sensors, or you have things like "feature" phones where the closest thing to a standardized platform you have is Java ME.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#360

Post by downandout »

If we "concede defeat" of the mobile web, then we wind up with only content and functionality that has been approved and can be killed on a whim by Apple and Google. Wars have been fought over freedom of expression, and now we have voluntarily given two companies and the governments they answer to the power to crush anything they don't like, based upon cryptic and arbitrary guidelines. That is a truly scary world.

Like many things, native is perfect in theory but in practice comes with massive drawbacks. A happy medium may indeed exist, but "conceding defeat" of the mobile web isn't going to get us any closer to it.

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