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

561–570 of 717 posts

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#561

Post by rtpg »

smsm42 wrote: post #556
nostrademons wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The security aspect was an interesting part of this piece, because one of the main reasons webapps took over from Windows apps is because they were perceived as more secure. I could disable ActiveX and Java and be reasonably confident that visiting a webpage would not pwn my computer, which I certainly couldn't do when downloading software from the Internet. And then a major reason mobile apps took over from webapps…

> I could disable ActiveX and Java and be reasonably confident that visiting a webpage would not pwn my computer Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. There were bugs in image processing, PDF processing (some browsers would load it without user prompting), Flash, video decoders, etc. IIRC even in JS engines, though those are more rare. Of course, you could go text-only, but then you couldn't properly access about…

When there would be a bug in PDF processing, you end up with a RCE, right?

But downloading an EXE is basically allowing arbitrary code execution on your machine no matter what. So _even with the security bugs_, webapps are basically safer than installing a native app on desktop, at least in its current state.

I see your point though. There are still a lot of entry points we need to be careful about

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#562

Post by blub »

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…

"But I will open basically anything in a web browser because I don't have to trust it."

That's incredibly funny. I guess sooner or later you'll learn why it's a losing strategy.

The web is probably the largest malware infection vector nowadays.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#563

Post by rtpg »

naasking wrote: post #465
nostrademons wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The security aspect was an interesting part of this piece, because one of the main reasons webapps took over from Windows apps is because they were perceived as more secure. I could disable ActiveX and Java and be reasonably confident that visiting a webpage would not pwn my computer, which I certainly couldn't do when downloading software from the Internet. And then a major reason mobile apps took over from webapps…

> 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…

buffer overflows used to be a thing in all software. Nowadays it's relegated to stuff written in C (essentially).

It used to be that RandomBusinessApp would hit this stuff, now most of it ends up in Java so it might still crash but usually it's mitigated better.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#564

Post by pcwalton »

tluyben2 wrote: post #526
int_19h wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi was better in that regard, because you could anchor sides and corners of widgets to their containers. In many cases, it was sufficient to allow for a resizable layout. But it doesn't solve the problem with high DPI, changing fonts, and localized strings being sometimes significantly longer, requiring widgets to be resized to accommodate them.

Agreed. And yes, that needs some attention, but most people doing responsive web do not account for most of that either. What does changing fonts mean? You design something for a font and then change it afterwards or? When I click on some languages (I am not native English and my native language, Dutch, is not very high on the list of priorities for most companies) in some of the biggest companies in the world, you n…

I used to write Petzold-style Win32 apps. I've also written native Cocoa apps as recently as last month, and I've used Qt and GTK+. Having experience with all of these, my preference is still for Web apps, because of the ease of portability and the fact that TypeScript beats C++ for ergonomics, safety, and ecosystem (just having a package manager is huge, even if NPM leaves something to be desired).

I find it fun to write Cocoa apps too, and I do on occasion for throwaway stuff that only I am going to use. But too many people (including me, at home!) simply don't use Macs. When I have to write a portable app, the choices basically come down to GTK+ (doesn't look native anywhere but GNOME on Linux), Qt (requires C++ plus moc and doesn't always look native either, for example on GNOME), or writing everything from scratch for every platform. While the last choice may be the "right" one from a purist's point of view, the extreme amount of work necessary to make duplicate Windows/Mac/Linux (often plus Android and iOS) versions makes it all but out of reach for anyone but big companies.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#565

Post by cm2187 »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #552
cm2187 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can do this with Excel also. When was the last time you used Excel? How do you do that then?

Mark separate areas on the same worksheet as tables, set chart location to be the same worksheet as the tables. If you're bothered by the gridlines those can be turned off. Not much to it really. You can also create dashboard-style content with PowerView (which is one of the PowerBI features built into Excel).

No need to be condescending, I am a heavy excel user, possibly more than you.

Tables may be fine in Excel for data but useless for any custom logic, which is what I use the most excel for. I am not aware that tables overflow with a scrollbar like Apple's approach allows. If you need to add more rows to the top table, the bottom table goes off screen. If the top table contains a very wide column, the bottom table needs to have the same column width. These are all inconveniences that apple's approach solves (and wouldn't be very hard to implement in excel while preserving backward compatibility). I don't see how Excel tables solve any of that.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#566

Post by int_19h »

tluyben2 wrote: post #526
int_19h wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi was better in that regard, because you could anchor sides and corners of widgets to their containers. In many cases, it was sufficient to allow for a resizable layout. But it doesn't solve the problem with high DPI, changing fonts, and localized strings being sometimes significantly longer, requiring widgets to be resized to accommodate them.

Agreed. And yes, that needs some attention, but most people doing responsive web do not account for most of that either. What does changing fonts mean? You design something for a font and then change it afterwards or? When I click on some languages (I am not native English and my native language, Dutch, is not very high on the list of priorities for most companies) in some of the biggest companies in the world, you n…

> And yes, that needs some attention, but most people doing responsive web do not account for most of that either. What does changing fonts mean? You design something for a font and then change it afterwards or?

Think about user changing the default UI font. OS X and Windows both make it difficult to impossible, and for this exact reason. On Linux, though, it's common and expected (which is probably why all UI frameworks that target it do have some decent dynamic layout support).

But aside from font family, there's also the issue of font size. That one can be cranked up on high-DPI displays, or for accessibility purposes.

> I find html/css just painful to work with

Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not praising HTML5 and CSS here. They're vastly overcomplicated for what they do, for app development. And layouts are a long solved problem in desktop UI frameworks - Qt, Tk, Swing, WPF are just a few examples. WPF in particular is a good example of an XML-based markup language specifically for UI, and it's light years ahead of HTML5 in terms of how easy it is to achieve common things, and how flexible things are overall.

If even half the time and energy invested into building "web apps" (including all the Electron-based stuff) went into an existing UI framework - let's say Qt and QML - we'd all be much better off; developers with far more convenient tools, and users with apps that look and feel native, work fast, and with smaller download sizes (because you aren't effectively shipping the whole damn browser with them).

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#567

Post by wpietri »

michaelmrose wrote: post #384
wpietri wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But modern UI in Office is only an evolution of what was there in the 90s and hasn't changed fundamentally either yet it doesn't feel any faster. Sure, and Office in the 90s didn't feel any faster than the word processing I was doing on an Apple II+ in middle school. This is because the people buying (and building) software care about other things than processor efficiency. If it's generally fast enough for their n…

You are ignoring battery life which is a useful consideration on laptops which appear to be the majority of pcs. You are also ignoring the notion that a user may want to run a variety of apps, and not want to close or have any of the lot swapped out and pretending the hit on performance, resources, and battery life isn't cumulative.

I'm not ignoring them. I just didn't mention them in this comment. They fit in the same rubric.

A user can run a few things even on the low-end netbook. Tabs are cheap. And if they hit the limits of their machine, they can either pay in a reasonable number of user-minutes to actively manage resources or a modest number labor-hours to get something beefier.

I personally would like to see things better optimized. After all, I started programming on a computer with 4K of RAM. But I recognize that there is very little economic incentive to do so.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#568

Post by ZenoArrow »

SwellJoe wrote: post #559
ZenoArrow wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Also, desktop apps have had the Internet for decades. What have they done with it?" Automatic updates is the answer that springs to mind first. Is there something more they should be doing with the Internet? The only other answer I could think of was 'social connectivity', but in the world of desktop apps, there's no major downside with splitting out social connectivity into separate apps. I don't care if a deskto…

So, this seems strange, to me, and maybe misses the point of the web entirely. I'm not talking about bolted-on "social" features. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built on categories of software that did not exist in 1990. Google Docs isn't merely a word processor (spreadsheet, etc.) with social features...the "chat" is ancillary to the real benefits; it's an entirely different way to work with docume…

> "Youtube, facebook, Google Maps, Amazon, craigslist, Netflix"

There's nothing stopping any of those being implemented as desktop apps. In the case of Netflix and Google Maps they already have equivalents on the desktop that are even more capable than their online equivalents, such as Kodi and Google Earth.

As for the collaborative document features of Google Docs, MS Office has this as well. The main benefit of Google Docs is its price.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#569

Post by wpietri »

curun1r wrote: post #378
wpietri wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? My recollection is that Gmail was substantially different in the extent to which it was an in-browser Javascript app built around server-side data requests. That's in contrast to something where applications were a series of mostly-static pages. At the time this change was known as AJAX, and GMail is listed as a pioneer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) Squirrelmail, by contrast, rendered a ne…

My recollection was that Outlook's Web Access was the first. IIRC, it used what would become XMLHttpRequest when it was still internal to Microsoft, so it's the first of what we might consider to be modern web application. GP's 1997 seems right on, though, since that was the first release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web#History_2

GP cites Squirrelmail, which definitely was not AJAXy. And still isn't, I'm pretty sure.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#570

Post by ZenoArrow »

cm2187 wrote: post #565
ZenoArrow wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark separate areas on the same worksheet as tables, set chart location to be the same worksheet as the tables. If you're bothered by the gridlines those can be turned off. Not much to it really. You can also create dashboard-style content with PowerView (which is one of the PowerBI features built into Excel).

No need to be condescending, I am a heavy excel user, possibly more than you. Tables may be fine in Excel for data but useless for any custom logic, which is what I use the most excel for. I am not aware that tables overflow with a scrollbar like Apple's approach allows. If you need to add more rows to the top table, the bottom table goes off screen. If the top table contains a very wide column, the bottom table need…

> "No need to be condescending, I am a heavy excel user, possibly more than you."

Believe what you want.

> "I am not aware that tables overflow with a scrollbar like Apple's approach allows."

If scrollbars matter to you then you can use Power View, which is one of the Power BI features available in Excel. To get a better idea of how it works, take a look at this short video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f6QS13RtrmM

Post reply on HN