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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

#691

Post by michaelmrose »

wpietri wrote: post #567
michaelmrose wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't it kind of offensive to suppose that billions of users should pay more money so that hundreds of developers can use less efficient tools to build apps?

Isn't this backwards?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#693

Post by astura »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #337
astura wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were plenty of webapps before Gmail. There was even plenty of other webmail services before Gmail and Gmail wasn't much different from the status quo. I've been using webmail since 1997 and even my University had a web interface (SquirrelMail) for those who preferred using the web interface (almost everyone). This was pre Gmail.

> Gmail wasn't much different from the status quo GMail was different because it offered an outlandish 1GB of mail space, when everywhere else you got 1-10MB mailboxes. Since it was launched on April 1st, most people did not believe it at first. And (at the time) huge space allowed users to keep and search all old email, instead of deleting old emails being a weekly chore.

I meant from a UI/UX prospective.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#694

Post by astura »

wpietri wrote: post #569
curun1r wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I mean was:

-Webmail was already established as a "thing" when Gmail came out, even in Universities.

-Gmail wasn't particularly special from a UI perspective and was comparable to other offerings at the time.

-There was plenty of other web apps already that weren't Google products. In fact, I, personally, was writing one at the time GMail came in out.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#695

Post by wpietri »

astura wrote: post #694
wpietri wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What I mean was: -Webmail was already established as a "thing" when Gmail came out, even in Universities. -Gmail wasn't particularly special from a UI perspective and was comparable to other offerings at the time. -There was plenty of other web apps already that weren't Google products. In fact, I, personally, was writing one at the time GMail came in out.

Sure webmail had been out for a decade before GMail. But I believe the point was that Gmail was special in that it was a pioneering user of AJAX-style interactivity.

Pre-AJAX, web-based services were just a series of forms, and the interactivity patterns harkened back to "smart terminal" [1] form-based use for mainframes in the 1970s. I believe the user you were responding to uses "application" to mean something approximating the desktop application experience of the 80s or the current mobile app experience.

So the distinction they're drawing is about the kind of interactivity. Squirrelmail, et al, were a series of forms and pages. GMail didn't do a new page or frame load every time you looked at a new message. UI rendering and interactivity became client-only activities, with the server providing an API.

[1] now known as block-oriented terminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block-oriented_terminal

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#696

Post by wpietri »

michaelmrose wrote: post #691
wpietri wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't it kind of offensive to suppose that billions of users should pay more money so that hundreds of developers can use less efficient tools to build apps? Isn't this backwards?

If those are the only factors and the numbers fall in particular ranges, sure. Otherwise, no.

Try doing the math here. How much cheaper would a netbook get if every single developer coordinated to reduce RAM and CPU usage? $5? Maybe $10? Looking at market prices, old RAM and CPUs are cheap. They consume basically the same physical resources as new RAM and CPUs, so price competition for not-the-best hardware is fierce.

Now ask those people if they'd pay $5 or $10 more for assorted new software features. Any features they can think of. And keep in mind that in that price range, people are paying $10 more to pick the color of their computer.

So sure, it offends me a little, because I like optimizing the things I pay attention to, like RAM usage. But if instead I optimize for the sorts of the things users care about, especially as reflected by what they'll actually pay for it becomes pretty clear: users don't care about the things I do.

So then the moral question becomes for me: who am I to impose my aesthetic choices on the people I'm trying to serve?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#697

Post by RUG3Y »

Endy wrote: post #463
RUG3Y wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds awesome except for that fact that my customers refuse to use modern browsers that support modern CSS features. GRRR.

Your customers sound like the smartest and most sensible people I've heard about in a while. The current way the Web is changing makes it almost impossible for in-house use in a large corporate environment. But at the same time, it's almost impossible to avoid it entirely; so instead do the smart thing and put a hard stop on it and refuse to hit the moving target.

I don't disagree. I feel like I'm caught in the middle. I personally prefer the old internet where websites could have simple design and typography and still be perceived to have value.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#698

Post by kllrnohj »

hutzlibu wrote: post #539
kllrnohj wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dynami…

> Source?

https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/facebook-mobile-app-...

Over 50% of facebook users only access it from their mobile devices.

> 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"

You could make that claim but it'd be a tough sell. Sites like this are clearly not what anyone talks about when they say "web app" or extol the virtues of HTML5. This site is static(-ish) content with hyperlinks to go to new static pages. It's not dynamic or highly interactive. Which is part of what makes it great, don't get me wrong. But it's clearly not a candidate for a web app, it's not clamoring for webasm, webgl, or any of those shiny new toys, etc...

> the web is faaaar away from static documents linking each other, what was it's origin.

How do you figure? Most people google something (either via a dumb web form or more commonly via a native app), then click a link to a static page.

Or this site, which is basically just an index page of yesteryear, and is literally just a bunch of static links to other usually static content.

> 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.

I disagree since the underlying technology really truly doesn't exist. The fundamental basics to making a responsive app still don't exist at all (no cheap concurrency, for example, to say nothing of cheap parallelism).

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#699

Post by wpietri »

eadmund wrote: post #673
wpietri wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dunno. When I was overseas I had a Kindle which lasted for something like two weeks between charges; that was awesome . Much better than my laptop which I had to charge every day for hours. I wouldn't mind a true low-power laptop which only needed a charge twice a month.

Sure, but that won't come from people programming differently. The laptop backlight alone is a few watts. If your battery is 40 watt-hours, you're not going to get to 2 weeks of usage no matter how little the CPU gets used.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#700

Post by kllrnohj »

twe4ked wrote: post #531
kllrnohj wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Maybe? Hard to tell since Google Docs on Android at least is a native app not a wrapper around the website and I'd assume that's true on iOS as well.

Similarly Microsoft Office on mobile is a native app, and I can't seem to find good stats for how Office on Windows/Mac compares to the Docs suite on desktop but my guess is that it's not a pretty comparison for Google Docs...

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