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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

#621

Post by justin1364 »

Fej wrote: post #433
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 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.

Maybe this reflects insecurity (in the psychological sense) from the community of people who love the web? That in itself is interesting.

Fwiw, long live the web. It's imperfect, but it's open. I'll take chaotic freedom to tight control any day.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#622

Post by hutzlibu »

mike_hearn wrote: post #615
DINKDINK wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What's odd is that this article is so well written that it really clicks with bitter developers who are just confused in the vast sea of alternative technologies Hearn has a penchant for penning very well written articles but complaining about systemic issues rather than directly solving them. He was the kernel of the block size split that occurred in bitcoin starting in 2015 whose vitriolic fruit still bears today.…

I think that's a bit unfair. Firstly, I did try and solve the block size problem. Myself and Gavin did Bitcoin XT. It resulted in large DDoS attacks that took out entire regional areas because they contained a single XT node, any mention of XT being banned from the Bitcoin forums, large companies like Coinbase being banned too for simply experimenting with it, and so on. Miners also refused to run it because they wer…

"As for this article, it says there's a second part coming where I propose concrete solutions"

looking forward for it ...

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#623

Post by jackcviers3 »

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…

> If programmers paid more than lip service to responsibility, they'd push for safer languages.

Most programmers want to dio their job quickly and easily, and go home.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#624

Post by krausejj »

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…

also - how do you kill it? i'm not sure you can. thankfully.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#625

Post by dmitriid »

dustinfarris wrote: post #602
kuon wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using elm for some time now, and it's the first time I feel I am using a non broken tool.

Agreed, I learned Elm a year ago and haven’t looked back. Love being able to dismiss all other frontend web talk without a second thought.

But you can't. The moment you need to do a layout, you're back into html + css and it's inabilty to cater to anything beyond single-page documents (not apps) ;)

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#626

Post by bloaf »

fdchn2016 wrote: post #501
bloaf wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many really truly secure C programs have ever been released into the wild? Maybe qmail? But qmail did it by completely rewriting the C standard library.

And yet the code that controls the spacecraft launch and control is written in C. I'll still agree with you that it's really hard to write good secure C code.

I'm sure you've seen this; it's posted here regularly:

http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#627

Post by homakov »

mike_hearn wrote: post #597
bastawhiz wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what the argument you're putting forth is. All of the HTML-generating tools I'm aware of (barring dumb string templating tools) work sufficiently well and prevent human error. My point is that there's nothing wrong with HTML. HTML isn't a tool, it's a format for storing and transmitting hypertext. If you're using React or HAML or any of the other HTML-generating tools, you're effectively immune from XSS.…

The prevalence of XSS suggest that the web ecosystem has failed to produce the sort of tools you suggest. If such tools actually existed and were good, people would use them and web app exploits would be a curiosity rather than an expectation. However, no such tool exists. I think there's a deeper issue here: the sheer number of ways you can generate XSS alone, even ignoring the other exploit types, is far beyond wha…

Thanks for a mention. Yes, I find web deeply broken. If any big company decides to reengineer it from scratch: I'm available to help for free :)

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#628

Post by gregmac »

mike_hearn wrote: post #612
gregmac wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem is they are trying to solve different problems. Microsoft stuff was going for fixed screen size/resolution, fixed layout, and using a quite limited set of controls. Web browsers try to be accommodating by default - any screen size (including mobile), zoom built in, and significantly more powerful control primitives that allow enormous flexibility in the way to design things. If you're building forms a…

Very few web apps actually use the same HTML for desktop and mobile. It's more common for WordPress templates and other document-like things, but the UI constraints on a phone are so different that it's better to create a dedicated UI for them. So I'm not sure judging VB6 by that metric is valuable.

It's not just mobile though - it's different dpi (4k screens are getting more popular), window sizes and zoom levels. Mobile is probably not a target for the forms apps the OP is talking about, but tablets may be, and different generations of various laptops and PCs are.

Web works across everything with little to no extra effort, whereas native app built with WYSIWYG UI builder is going to be constrained to certain hardware and take extra effort for handling display variations.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#629

Post by scarface74 »

pendar747 wrote: post #586
usr1106 wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can assume that many HN readers are closely related to Web programming. Either they do it themselves or their wage gets paid because their employers' business depends on Web apps. If the article is right that it is close to impossible to hire a Web developer that understands all Web security issues and knows to mitigate them, it does not come as a surprise that there is fierce criticism to the article. It basicall…

The author definitely has valid arguments about web's security but I think the rest of his arguments are all lazy, anecdotal and not accurate. Comparing Google Docs to an old version of Office for example. They are incomparable firstly because they are running on completely different platforms. Office would take a long time to install while Google Docs are available almost instantly, they can be updated almost instan…

The author definitely has valid arguments about web's security but I think the rest of his arguments are all lazy, anecdotal and not accurate. Comparing Google Docs to an old version of Office for example. They are incomparable firstly because they are running on completely different platforms. Office would take a long time to install while Google Docs are available almost instantly, they can be updated almost instantly and secondly include many more benefits that come with being part of the web.

But even Google knew not to depend on the universality of web apps on mobile - they have native apps for both Android and iOS. Aren’t we already at a tipping point where most web access is done on mobile devices?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#630

Post by gregmac »

pjmlp wrote: post #581
gregmac wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem is they are trying to solve different problems. Microsoft stuff was going for fixed screen size/resolution, fixed layout, and using a quite limited set of controls. Web browsers try to be accommodating by default - any screen size (including mobile), zoom built in, and significantly more powerful control primitives that allow enormous flexibility in the way to design things. If you're building forms a…

Super easy, VB.NET with WPF or UWP layouts.

WPF is much closer to web development than the drag and drop WYSIWYG UI development (VB6 / WinForms) the OP was taking about. I've never done UWP but it sounds nearly the same as WPF.
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