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Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

the point is HTML5/CSS/JS nowadays provides superior UI experience to traditional UI frameworks. In many of the categories above, there are electron/webview based applications that's very popular.

Text editor, document editor -> VS Code/Atom

terminal emulator -> Google's terminal emulator

git GUI client -> GitHub client is electron based

chat client -> slack is electron based

games -> lots of web based

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The only thing superior about HTML/CSS/JS GUI are its ease of deployment and portability characteristics. As a UI platform, it feels like a huge step back from modern desktop GUI APIs, like we are doing UI programming in the 90s again.

And I feel the other way around. "Modern Desktop GUI" feels clunky and archaic to me :-) Like menus and toolbars and the "ribbon" ajd the status bar and those clunky desktop widgets...

That is a UI design issue: you don’t gave to use those, and if you do, it’s up to you to use them right. Web comes with a lot of limitations, many of those widgets obviously don’t make sense in the browser; heck they probably don’t make sense on the desktop but that is less obvious. With web, simplicity is enforced out of nescessary limitation, and this has turned out to be good for users.

From a programming perspective, modern desktop UI libraries are much more powerful and have less limitations. How you use that power is up to you and your UXD, however.

It's because you have been conditioned to have low expectations by web apps.

I've been programming computers since the time they came with two 5.25 inch floppies with green text monitors and have seen all UI paradigms since then. Maybe I have a right to have a point of view?

The standard desktop design paradigms were built by programmers for programmers - a lazy way to approach things leading to clunky to use software. The dog eat dog world of the web and rise of touch has forced us to turn to designers to play a huge role in simplifying interfaces and flows.

>The standard desktop design paradigms were built by programmers for programmers - a lazy way to approach things leading to clunky to use software. The dog eat dog world of the web and rise of touch has forced us to turn to designers to play a huge role in simplifying interfaces and flows.

UI design and HCI has been a thing for 4+ decades.

The web is a very poor example of those things -- not to mention it has forgotten decades of research and best practices.

What it has is just ubiquity and easy access.

I'll see your 5.25 floppies and green text monitors and raise you 8" floppies and smooth-scrolling VT100s.

Agree with your opinions, though, you old fart.

Electron != web app. Have you tried using Slack's actual web client vs the Electron app? I personally strongly prefer the stand-alone client. The same with the git GUI client. The equivalent web thing is github.com.

If the original statement was "I prefer Electron for my desktop apps over Qt/Wx/GTK/etc." I could totally understand that. But the original comment was "My 'go to GUI' is a web app". That's not the same thing. It is our modern version of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

> It is our modern version of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

No. I've written GUI software, and tools for building GUI software[1], in the past.

1: https://github.com/cabalamat/parrot

It's not my experience. Appart from some chat apps and vscode, i have only bad xp with electron apps. Stuff like stremio or popcorn time are slow and the mix of web paradigms into the destop sucks. Using dropbox, office, mails clients, are way better on native than then web version.

Also, GUI toolkits were never fun or easy to use in desktop development. I've used MFC, wx and Qt with C++, Forms and WPF with C# and Qt with Python. All of those had their challenges so browser-based GUIs don't seem so bad as an alternative. Not a fan of JS but modern toolkits are almost at a point where they hide enough of the ugliness.

Never? Dude, Tk back in the day! Compared with all the raw X11 predecessors, it was a revelation for Unix GUI's.

True - Tk was quite the step up back then. I still use it every day when I fire up gitk or git gui.

Also, GUI toolkits were never fun or easy to use in desktop development.

NeXTSTEP was fun. Frankly, its still easier to develop for OPENSTEP 4.x then the web. VB when it first came out was amazing and all the VBX control you could buy were amazing. Heck, even the Newton was a lot cleaner to build a UI which still amazes me since Javascript should have been capable of the same type of prototype-based interface.

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