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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

> Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

I'll tell you. Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue, so they hobbled Netscape, brought browser development in house, and made a prohibition on allowing web pages to be integrated tightly into the OS.

If those electron apps could get the same OS integration in the browser as native apps get, the distributable could be kilobytes, even smaller than your Delphi executable.

But how would Microsoft and Apple make money if they're just a host for web apps? They're not going to turn themselves into a commodity/utility.

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There is simple counterargument: there is integrated runtime for webapps in windows since at least windows 98 (probably since 95 desktop update bundled with IE4). Just rename HTML file to .hta. Running that gets you IE window without any browser UI and scripts in the page run outside any sandbox and can interact with windows API anyway they want. Various windows components are exactly this.

Most users can't rename files, so this feature de facto doesn't exist.

Why users have to rename anything? Do they have to rename .exes or .msi?

In early '00s, there surely were apps made and distributed as .hta files. Not much as .exes, of course, because even with ActiveX, DHTML was quite limited.

Heck, when I was in school, me and a buddy wrote a desktop web chat client using that tech (we wanted fancy text formatting and image posting that "official" webchat page hadn't, but we had - because it server lacked proper HTML sanitization, lol)

This seems... backwards. What integration could MS give to web apps that they aren't already? Microsoft replaced their help file format with HTML starting with Vista. HTML and JS are first-class languages for building UWP apps. If anything, it's Netscape's lawsuit against MS for bundling IE that kept them from doing more to integrate web pages into the OS, not the moving of browser development in-house.

Start menu integration, USB device access, graphics and sound APIs, notifications...

Just look at the Windows APIs there are a wealth of things Microsoft doesn't want in browsers if they can avoid it.

Well... there are people on the browser team trying their best, but the resource constraints keep investment where it needs to be to protect Windows and Office licensing.

> Start menu integration, USB device access, graphics and sound APIs, notifications...

You can get all that through UWP, though, can't you?

You can even get access to all of that from a webpage, if you know how to ask. [1]

[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/hosted...

> Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue

I don't really understand. I never paid a license to create and distribute native applications.

Well there's Office.

But also you provide the content which makes Windows licenses have value. If there were no Windows apps, they couldn't price it higher than Linux.

2005 called and want's it's arguments back. Microsoft has been moving a lot of products to the web where possible, for example Office 365.

1998 called and told it's a mistake. Those are not 2005's arguments, those are 1995/96 ones - before MISE4 knocked on the door with Active Desktop.

Before the .NET age, Microsoft was very active with ideas about bringing Web on desktop.

That doesn't contradict anything I said.

Historically, the web version of office is not really a stand-alone product, and is designed to be a helpful feature for people who primarily use office on a Windows PC.

I think Office 365 can definitely stand alone and compare with something like Google Apps (GSuite). That many people use it in conjunction with offline Office is more a result of offline Office being the incumbent during the transition.

I don't think they can tightly integrate web pages into their OS after the whole antitrust thing.

Back when MS was hobbling netscape web apps weren't a possibility, machines simply did not have enough memory to run them.

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