Rise of the meta-platforms and the new 'web browser' | Hacker News Reader

Rise of the meta-platforms and the new 'web browser'

paul.kinlan.me

21 pointsmmahemoff8 comments

Regarding performance, I've noticed this weird attitude of some people that when I say, hey, I know how to make our mobile web faster, the answer is "users don't care" / "low prio". Those same people say, yeah, we need a native app, it will be so much more smooth, performant and everything!

What's the answer? Is it just wait it out?

STOP. USING. SO MUCH. CLIENT-SIDE. RENDERING.

If the web can beat Microsoft in 1998, it will beat Apple as well. It doesn't look that way today, but the cracks are showing. I suppose if it became significantly easier to create an app than a website, the walled gardens could win, but that doesn't seem likely.

Author here. My thought around this is not that Apple will win, it is that there are other platforms now (hosted on Apple and Android platforms) that sit at the same level as the web sites and they have large audiences interacting with them daily. Facebook and WeChat in China are examples of this.

The weird thing about messaging is those platforms tend to be very fluid. They look dominant, but fade fast.

Yea, the browser based web keeps losing market share. First to mobile apps, now to dedicated document readers. Both performance problems. But the slow document problem is not very technical, mostly politics. There's no mechanism for enforcing requirements across a wild west of bloat.

Flash's demise was for similar reasons. Bloat caused by over eager developers gained it a reputation for slow loading times and unusable websites. In this case the usable web is punished too.

Interesting thoughts. I wonder if Content Blockers or user-agent interventions can enforce requirements https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

Also, Google Search did it for mobileness (pushing a down rank) on none mobile friendly site (for mobile users). Developers and businesses tend to see these as sticks and not carrots

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