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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

All those things existed before they became web sites, and they aren’t web sites for any particularly good reason today. Email is a good example. GMail is Outlook rewritten in VBA running inside Word.

Let me guess... you’re a JS dev and you think “little upvote arrows” are where the real value is?

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Except for the fact that most people use these services in the browser even when there are native clients available? In nearly all of the listed cases the bottleneck is almost always the network and not the JS runtime.

Clearly the users are wrong, I guess? Perhaps you should explain to them why your delicate design sensibilities dictate that they should download native clients because you think HTTP has gone off spec.

Let me guess... you're a COBOL dev and think computers should have never developer GUIs.

you're a COBOL dev and think computers should have never developer GUI

Not quite that old, but I was doing web and Java professionally in 1995, so I’ve seen it all.

The users are not wrong; they’ve simply been trapped in a local minima by inexperienced developers who would rather reinvent the wheel than make progress. Except every time the wheel gets squarer.

Gmail is Outlook rewritten in VBA running inside Word, except it works better and doesn't leave you open to a bunch of viruses. I mean did you ever use the Windows client of Outlook? On the one hand your argument makes it seem that you did, but on the other hand you also seem to prefer it to Gmail which makes me distrust the argument completely!

Other than that Email is a good example.

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