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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

In a pre-app 2007 world, this would have been a killer web app for the v1 iPhone.

Not sure why this was downvoted. This is an interesting and perfectly valid observation.

I would go even further:

A surprisingly high number of "apps" could be replaced with web apps, where "installation" of the app means the JS/HTML is cached in the browser, and "upgrade" means a new version is downloaded by the browser (e.g. due to changed ETag identifier, or whatever).

Moreover, these "apps" would have almost no access to personal user data, which may be bad for business, but is more often that not a win from the privacy and customer protection perspective.

Upvote for webapps, the sooner we come back to the web, the better we will be.

Strange, i'm trying to get further from the web.

As it stands, everything i do is web related in one way or another. From storage to home assistants to note taking and blah blah blah, they're all on the web hosted by someone else.

I know there are a few alternatives, but none of it really makes me happy. Currently, i'm trying to make my own home cloud, with a focus on simplicity.. but i doubt i'll succeed. I just know that nothing seems simple. I'm talking like, single binary "can't fuck it up" simple. Because it has to be stupidly easy to be used by my grandma, even if that means less features.

JS/HTML can be run on your own machine without needing any cloud or other external service. You could distribute the application as a single .zip file or something, like binary executables often are. I've seen people sell games this way.

Yep, this is not a bad idea but unfortunately browsers do not allow you access to local storage since they do not treat the local filesystem as designated domain paths.. which is completely super annoying & makes offline webapps a very temporal thing since they NEED a domain name cached before you can use them.

Note: based on my experience when hacking around with local app 2 years ago on Chrome and FF so things may have changed?

You can use node if you want those kinds of permissions. Or any other general purpose language with runtime.

Node is not exactly "can't fuck it up" simple.

The whole point of running and using browser apps is that they are guaranteed to be sandboxed - Node.js breaks this sandboxing 100% which makes it more powerful but also inherently a mess security wise. This mess can to a certain extend be accommodated on the server side but certainly not on the client side where code from 1000s of devs will eventually be run without vetting.

Good lord no. The Web is a terrible place. It should stay where it is and we should not try to take its terrible principles elsewhere.

Better in some ways, but certainly not performance!

WebAssembly might be a big step towards improving that.

It absolutely will. I've compiled like 30 projects to the web now and across the board I'm seeing 10x to 40x improvements in speed compared to idiomatic JavaScript. Here's one of the Benchmarks I ran:

Native: 57.26 ms

wasm Firefox: 143.35 ms

asm.js Firefox: 162.43 ms

asm.js Edge: 199.70 ms

wasm Chrome: 223.80 ms

asm.js Chrome: 268.60 ms

JS Chrome: 2898.20 ms

JS Edge: 3240.00 ms

JS Firefox: 5558.88 ms

When you say "speed" are you talking about startup (getting the page to a usable state) or crunchy ongoing work?

Nah, I'm talking about running an algorithm.

And here we are in a world where everyone thinks they need an app. I am 100% in your camp, the browser was the solution to multi-platform mobile apps.

Did it not come with a timer builtin? That seems like quite an oversight.

Don't remember those "iPhone vs rock" comparison charts? The 1 was a bit of a joke, it didn't have basic features that any smartphone at the time had (e.g. copy-paste).

When the first wave of smart watches came out I was shocked to learn that timers weren't core functionality.

Timer is so useful for me to check out my fitness level or just set a goal. If I can do a 400m lap under 60 sec that means I am good to go. Two minute plank, good to go. Five minute squat good to go. Apart from that timer is good for pomodoro, meditation, measuring heart beat or anything. I know of time when doctors can grab wrist and tell heart beat with so much accuracy. But today I see it going downhill. I don't need Cloud sync or any gimmick. I am sharp enough to keep data in my mind or if it so useful then I can go back and log it in Excel sheet myself. Putting so much emphasis on automation in a smart watch is a big turn off for me.

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