Comment by khedoros1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by khedoros1 | Hacker News Reader

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I've never built a web application of any description. As a user, what are the improvements that I should be looking for that have been introduced over the past 10 years? It was longer ago than that that AJAX started getting big, and as far as I can tell, that was really the last key innovation for most apps: Being able to asynchronously load data and modify the DOM when it becomes available. I'm aware of other things like video tags, webgl, canvas, and such that allow us to replace Flash for a security win, but that seems replacing a past technology just to get feature parity with what we had a decade ago.

Everything else seems like stuff that makes things better for the developers but not much visible benefit to the user. I can understand where a comment about the web not being much better would come from, on the scale of a decade.

Go back 20 years, and you're talking about a completely different world; frames, forms, webrings, and "Best viewed with IE 4.0". But if '96 to '06 was a series of monumental leaps, '06 to '16 looks like some tentative hops.

There's actually a fair number of new features in the web today that you couldn't do in 2006 - offline access, push notifications, real-time communications (without a hack that breaks on most firewalls), smooth transitions, background computation, the history API, OS clipboard support, accelerometer access, geolocation access, multi-touch, etc.

Few websites use them effectively yet, at least in a way that benefits the consumer (several are using them to benefit marketers). This could be because developers don't know about them, consumers don't care about them, or perhaps just not enough time has passed. XHR was introduced in 1999, after all, but it took until 2004 before anyone besides Microsoft noticed it.

My first install of Netscape Communicator had an offline mode, and one of my colleagues recent told me how they had fully working live cross-browser video conferencing in 98. Their biggest competitor was WebEx, which is still around.

I think many of us underestimate what was possible to do in browsers. What has happened is that these features have been democratised: what took them months to build I can now pull of using WebRTC in the space of a weekend.

My very first software internship ever was getting streaming video to work for the Air Force Center Daily at MITRE Corp, back in 1997. I did it with RealPlayer, Layers in Netscape (remember them?) and DHTML in IE.

The thing is - the polish matters. You can't do viable consumer apps until they actually work like the consumer wants, which is often decades after the technology preview. You could emulate websockets using IFRAMES, script tags, and long-polling back in the late 90s, but a.) you'd get cut off with the slightest network glitch and b.) you'd spend so much time setting up your transport layer that you go bankrupt before writing the app.

Thank you for the explanation. Some of those I've known about (but they didn't come to mind in my original comment), and some are definitely things that I would've taken for granted (coming from a native application programming background). Those are all features added to web standards and implemented in browsers though, right?

They're all in web standards. Browser support varies but is generally pretty good for most of them.

They're taken for granted in native application programming, yes, but the big advantage of browsers is the zero-cost, on-demand install. This is a bit less of an advantage than it was in 2003 (where new Windows & Flash security vulnerabilities were discovered almost every day, and nobody dared install software less their computer be pwned), but there are still many applications where getting a user to install an app is a non-starter.

Most programs that existed before (lets be real.. programs were replaced with web apps now) defaulted to being offline only, or would sync. I miss those days.

> I miss those days.

Ditto. I like having a copy of a program that no one but me has access to modify, and I like that I don't have to rely on my ISP to use my computer. If I like a program, I don't want it to change until I choose to change it. I don't want to be A/B tested, marketed to, etc. I'd rather buy a license and be happy =)

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