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It’s time to kill the web app

blog.plan99.net

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Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#531

Post by twe4ked »

kllrnohj wrote: post #529
hutzlibu wrote: post #270

I rather think, It's time, to completley ignore sensationalistic rant's like this one. First of, killing a technology does not solve anything. It just means less options. So do propose your better solution (and build it) - then we can talk about killing the current thing. But the way it is today, the web works. Definitely not flawless and in large parts really ugly (just browsing with open dev-tools is horrifying, wh…

> But the way it is today, the web works. Does it really? What would you hold up as an example of a powerful web app with significant usage? All the major players these days (like Facebook) get the overwhelming majority of their traffic through their native mobile app, not through their web app. The web's primary stronghold is in publishing platforms (news, articles, etc...), which are not really what you'd call "app…

> What would you hold up as an example of a powerful web app with significant usage?

Google Docs suite perhaps?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#532

Post by janci »

> "Buffers that don’t specify their length" This is a good thing. You just need proper escaping. To parse data with length field you need higher-level automata (maybe even Turing-complete parser) than for delimited or quoted/brace-enclosed data.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#533

Post by tannhaeuser »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #295
tannhaeuser wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so I'm in full agreement. It's truly mind-blowing how much energy has been wasted on trying to shoehorn the web into an app delivery platform over the last decade. To what end? To make the browser a general purpose platform? We have that already, it's called an "operating system". Edit: that said, I disagree with many points and the general negativity in TFA

Are you comfortable running arbitrary binaries built by arbitrary people? If not, then I fail to see how an operating system is a sensible general purpose computing platform. It worked OK when we just wanted to run software written by a handful of trusted parties... Microsoft, Adobe, id Software. But as soon as there were 1000s of companies writing software that we wanted to try, running binaries ceased to be a good…

Web apps are hardly a solution to this problem, those being always connected. If regular apps need permissions (for eg. opening photos on your device) then so do web apps. Are you comfortable with web sites sending your location home, or recording audio/video? If anything, web apps are too sandboxed to do anything useful.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#534

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

hutzlibu wrote: post #358
smitherfield wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could've had that years ago if Mozilla had not (as all the browser vendors do depressingly often[1]) decided to torpedo NaCl for nonsensical reasons that boil down to "NIH," in favor of creating a far-inferior, crippled spec practically designed to be aimlessly bikeshedded for years. [1] Mozilla usually pulls such NIH moves to sabotage the introduction or use of languages (even DSLs) other than JS on the web. See…

Erm, "Mozilla usually pulls such NIH moves to sabotage the introduction or use of languages (even DSLs) other than JS on the web." maybe it is also because their ressources are limited and implementing a new language like dart is somewhat expensive. And NaCL even more I think. But I actually have some anger as well on them for enforcing indexedDB and killing everything else. So now we have to use f indexedDB for stor…

IndexedDB is seriously one of the web's biggest mistakes.

WebSQL was awesome, and most people already know how to work with a relational database and SQL.

A virtual file system API would be great. It's definitely one of the core features still missing from the ecosystem.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#535

Post by bottled_poe »

johnvega wrote: post #415
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…

This is a WEB APP https://3d.delavega.us using 3js. It can run on most iOS and Android smartphones, most Windows and macOS machines and Linux computers. It is likely to run on over a billion devices, and no installation required. Can a non webapp or native app be better than this?

Check this out: http://www.georgeandjonathan.com/

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#536

Post by hutzlibu »

smitherfield wrote: post #412
hutzlibu wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm, "Mozilla usually pulls such NIH moves to sabotage the introduction or use of languages (even DSLs) other than JS on the web." maybe it is also because their ressources are limited and implementing a new language like dart is somewhat expensive. And NaCL even more I think. But I actually have some anger as well on them for enforcing indexedDB and killing everything else. So now we have to use f indexedDB for stor…

Again, if it were a one-time thing it'd be different, but it's a pattern with Mozilla. > maybe it is also because their ressources are limited and implementing a new language like dart is somewhat expensive. And NaCL even more I think. If I recall correctly, Google offered to donate their engineers' time to implement Dart and/or NaCl in Firefox and Mozilla still refused. Also, WebAssembly is enormously more complex t…

"Google offered to donate their engineers' time to implement Dart and/or NaCl in Firefox and Mozilla still refused."

I did not know that - that is really a bad move.

"while Mozilla was napalming skyscraperfuls of $100 bills with their Firefox OS nonsense."

Well, I do not believe Firefox OS was nonsense. It was maybe just too ambitious and too many mistakes were made, like focus on low end. But allmost all of the development for Firefox OS directly helped also the Web in general, because most work, was work on WebStandards anyway. Just the ones for calling and sms you cannot really use, but all the other things like battery were beneficial.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#537

Post by candiodari »

uncletammy wrote: post #492
naasking wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A programmer thinks of all the ways that a program could fuck up your computer; it's a large part of our job description. The average person is terrible at envisioning things that don't exist or contemplating the consequences of hypotheticals that haven't happened. I'm not sure programmers are much better. There's a long history of security vulnerabilities being reinvented over and over. Like CSRF is simply an inst…

> And blaming this on the market is a cheap attempt to dodge responsibility. How many hacks, data breaches, and privacy violations does it take for consumers to start giving a shit? Also, any programmer will tell you that just because an issue is tagged "security" doesn't mean it will make it into the sprint. Programmers rarely get to set priorities.

> How many hacks, data breaches, and privacy violations does it take for consumers to start giving a shit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law

In other words, it takes a better alternative to exist. Better can mean cheaper or faster or easier, a lot of things. That can be accelerated by the economic concept of "war" (ie. any situation that makes alternatives a necessity).

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#538

Post by TekMol »

kllrnohj wrote: post #529
hutzlibu wrote: post #270

I rather think, It's time, to completley ignore sensationalistic rant's like this one. First of, killing a technology does not solve anything. It just means less options. So do propose your better solution (and build it) - then we can talk about killing the current thing. But the way it is today, the web works. Definitely not flawless and in large parts really ugly (just browsing with open dev-tools is horrifying, wh…

> But the way it is today, the web works. Does it really? What would you hold up as an example of a powerful web app with significant usage? All the major players these days (like Facebook) get the overwhelming majority of their traffic through their native mobile app, not through their web app. The web's primary stronghold is in publishing platforms (news, articles, etc...), which are not really what you'd call "app…

    What would you hold up as an example of a
    powerful web app with significant usage?
The web as a whole is one gigantic web app that works wonderfully. I am using the web all day and for pretty much everything. HN and the linked articles for news. Trello, Github, Upwork for collaboration. FB and Meetup to find an save events I want to attend. Booking.com to find and book hotels. My local railway site for train travel. My local cab site for cab rides. My local public transport site for bus/subway rides. Google flights for flight planning.... I could continue forever. Whenever I need something, I find it on Google and just use it.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#539

Post by hutzlibu »

kllrnohj wrote: post #529
hutzlibu wrote: post #270

I rather think, It's time, to completley ignore sensationalistic rant's like this one. First of, killing a technology does not solve anything. It just means less options. So do propose your better solution (and build it) - then we can talk about killing the current thing. But the way it is today, the web works. Definitely not flawless and in large parts really ugly (just browsing with open dev-tools is horrifying, wh…

> But the way it is today, the web works. Does it really? What would you hold up as an example of a powerful web app with significant usage? All the major players these days (like Facebook) get the overwhelming majority of their traffic through their native mobile app, not through their web app. The web's primary stronghold is in publishing platforms (news, articles, etc...), which are not really what you'd call "app…

"All the major players these days (like Facebook) get the overwhelming majority of their traffic through their native mobile app"

Source?

And I do not think, there is a sharp line between WebApp and Website. You could say, we are using one right now (even though very primitive) discussing right now - more than "static(-ish) content"

Also most of the other parts of the Web are not really static anymore - highly dynamic, live interaction between the whole world! That's pretty awesome if you think about it. So the Web works and the web is faaaar away from static documents linking each other, what was it's origin.

And with real webapps - well, I believe the big ones are about to come. The underlying technology to really make them usefull, is just about to become stable.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#540

Post by dgreensp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #530
Fej wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be the biggest dichotomy I've yet seen on HN. An opinion piece voted all the way to the top of the front page (with a clickbaity title, might I add), yet the top comment soundly debunks the article's arguments. Yeah, this is why everybody clicks on the comments link first.

To somewhat counter all the negative comments here - I read this article and agree pretty much 100% with every sentence in it. There are probably more people who agree with the post - hence the upvotes.

Yes, I agreed with the entire article as well. I didn't see anything controversial or exaggerated about it.

Edit: Ok, maybe I could have predicted that lines like "HTML 5 is a plague on our industry" would ruffle some feathers. I guess I like a little snark in my criticism.

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