Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 187 posts

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#71

Post by troupo »

diggan wrote: post #64
troupo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think words like "performant framework for building web user interfaces" (Vue), "rendering is blazing fast, because Lit touches only the dynamic parts of your UI" (lit) and similar mean? No, they don't mean "our architecture and state manipulation". > No one cares about state manipulation performance because as you said, it's a solved problem. Indeed. That's way in any modern all modern frameworks, withou…

From your own example, here is the text from https://vuejs.org/ as of today: > The Progressive JavaScript Framework > An approachable, performant and versatile framework for building web user interfaces. > Approachable - Builds on top of standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript with intuitive API and world-class documentation. > Performant - Truly reactive, compiler-optimized rendering system that rarely requires manual opt…

What do you think "performant UI" is in the context of the web?

What do you think all frontend libraries have been optimizing for for the past decade?

Why do you think they measure their performance by this benchmark: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...?

Or, as most people in the frontend space [1], you only understand the absolute surface level of the technologies you use? And unless it's spelled out in the exact words you expect, you don't understand the concepts?

[1] I'm a frontender myself, and the amount of people I meet who don't even have the most basic understanding of the tools and technologies they use is mind-boggling.

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#72

Post by croes »

lewisjoe wrote: post #9

This is definitely the way to go! The browser is not only good at network requests and sandboxing but comes with the most powerful layouting system and rendering engine. So yes, leveraging browsers just for the front-end of a local-first app is such a good direction to go. Generally apps tend to bundle their own browser runtime to leverage this component. Even the lighter weight electron alternatives tend to either i…

Good luck running you GUI from know in a browser in ten years or maybe even five.

Not to mention that WebGUIs are slow compared to native ones.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#73

Post by Turing_Machine »

d3w4s9 wrote: post #37
troupo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not sure how you come to this conclusion. By knowing and working with more technologies than just web tech. "The most the most powerful layouting system and rendering engine" struggles to render even a few dozen elements on screen without junk, tearing and consuming as many resources as a mid-sized game. > JS and the DOM are fast. DOM is slow as molasses. There's a reason why all frameworks are going to great…

You comment shows that you have no practical knowledge of the web ecosystem, and everything you know about it comes from all the blog articles that contributes nothing that's useful in real world use. The reality is that web is fast enough (even with all the tweaks and different approaches of frameworks, libraries etc), and it is the first choice for building a new cross-platform product and for migrating legacy proj…

> The reality is that web is fast enough

This. So much this.

Yes, there are contrived examples where DOM rendering speed makes a difference, and also a fair amount of real-world crapware (much of it written by companies that should know better) where shitty code continues to hit the DOM unnecessarily hundreds or thousands of times even after the page is allegedly "loaded", but that is not the fault of the DOM.

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#74

Post by Turing_Machine »

Xeamek wrote: post #53
d3w4s9 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You comment shows that you have no practical knowledge of the web ecosystem, and everything you know about it comes from all the blog articles that contributes nothing that's useful in real world use. The reality is that web is fast enough (even with all the tweaks and different approaches of frameworks, libraries etc), and it is the first choice for building a new cross-platform product and for migrating legacy proj…

>The reality is that web is fast enough No its fuckin not. We have devices running literally billions operations per second, orders of magnitude faster then what we had just few years ago, yet they struggle with rendering websites which comes down to presenting some good looking text. It's insane how my pc can compute entire 3d world with millions of triangles, 120 times a second, but it lags when I open few websites…

> et they struggle with rendering websites which comes down to presenting some good looking text.

Umm... you're putting the blame on the wrong thing here, dude.

> because some front dev crambed some 'cool' paralax effect onto it,

As I said.

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#75

Post by keepamovin »

lewisjoe wrote: post #9

This is definitely the way to go! The browser is not only good at network requests and sandboxing but comes with the most powerful layouting system and rendering engine. So yes, leveraging browsers just for the front-end of a local-first app is such a good direction to go. Generally apps tend to bundle their own browser runtime to leverage this component. Even the lighter weight electron alternatives tend to either i…

This is very polished and cool-looking. Inspiring. I find this project's level of polish very inspiring.

It's lovely to see someone has captured this idea and expressed it in the right way to make it interesting to many people. I really hope this mode of desktop apps can take off, at least to the level where the community has something to explore for a while to see if it works. I made something like this for Chrome browsers a while ago: nodejs backends, vanilla front-ends, built-in packaging using pkg. It's just a nice approach: https://github.com/dosyago/graderjs

And I made a demo using the venerable MS Paint clone JS Paint^0. The dev experience was great, I literally just dropped in the front-end code to the right folder, compiled it and wham, "desktop JS Paint" on 3 platforms, haha.

Using the ubiquitous local browser as the rendering / API engine for desktop just seems smart. And it's technically interesting, because you get to think in terms of how can you step back from the browser, the platform, the front-end and the back-end and come up with a general API that addresses all of it, which is kinda cool.

0: https://github.com/00000o1/jspaint.exe

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#76

Post by cortesoft »

lewisjoe wrote: post #9

This is definitely the way to go! The browser is not only good at network requests and sandboxing but comes with the most powerful layouting system and rendering engine. So yes, leveraging browsers just for the front-end of a local-first app is such a good direction to go. Generally apps tend to bundle their own browser runtime to leverage this component. Even the lighter weight electron alternatives tend to either i…

This is how Plex works

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#77

Post by croes »

austin-cheney wrote: post #13
troupo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but comes with the most powerful layouting system and rendering engine. It's not powerful by any stretch of imagination. If anything, it's the worlds most inefficient layouting and rendering system struggling to render anything beyond the most primitive things.

I am not sure how you come to this conclusion. JS and the DOM are fast. Aside from arithmetic JS is just as fast as Java now and only 2-4x slower than C++. The two big limitations from a pure processing perspective are the garbage collector and massive repaints of large data on large layouts.

Could it be you forgot how fast native GUIs are?

Every WebGUI I used lacks the snappiness of old school native ones.

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#78

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

This seems amazing, there is another similar project called tauri but it uses webgtk, which has its rough edges. Something integrated in the user preferred browser sounds amazing.

Is there any plan for mobile?

Does it open the user default browser with all extensions loaded?

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#79

Post by Xeamek »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #74
Xeamek wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reality is that web is fast enough No its fuckin not. We have devices running literally billions operations per second, orders of magnitude faster then what we had just few years ago, yet they struggle with rendering websites which comes down to presenting some good looking text. It's insane how my pc can compute entire 3d world with millions of triangles, 120 times a second, but it lags when I open few websites…

> et they struggle with rendering websites which comes down to presenting some good looking text. Umm... you're putting the blame on the wrong thing here, dude. > because some front dev crambed some 'cool' paralax effect onto it, As I said.

You mean that the fornt end devs aren't actually responsible for the rendering, but the browser devs are?

Would you apply the same logic to game optimization? That's it's not the responsibility of game devs, and instead we can shift all the blame to the gpu sdk team?

Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend

#80

Post by shellcoders »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #45

It's not confidence-inspiring that https://webui.me throws security warnings. I'd want folks to make applications "that make applications" to take security a little more seriously.

Yesterday the website was down, now is up !!
Post reply on HN