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Comment by sgustard | Hacker News Reader

Well I certainly want Google Maps to act like an app (which it does): panning, zooming and so on. And I'm happy for Hacker News to act like a traditional website. At that point it's a false dichotomy: different solutions for different problems, yes?

As an analogy: some pop-up books are amazing works of art. But reading would be frustrating if every book was a pop-up book.

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On one hand I appreciate how elaborately the parent comment made their point. On another, I appreciate how succinctly you made your point. A conundrum within a conundrum, indeed.

Sometimes the medium is the message; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

HN in a nutshell

Things that act like apps also can’t be adequately prevented from compromising the general data privacy of the population. What this means is that it doesn’t matter very much whether your or I have mere preferences for something to have rich app-like functionality or not. Our wanting of it does not play a role unless it can be made verifiably secure and not abusive of user privacy rights. So far, general web applications cannot be made verifiably non-abusive of users’ data privacy, so we must only focus on websites as purely structured documents with no app-like capability.

I sure wish companies wouldn’t abuse data privacy so we could instead care about user preferences for app-like functionality, but we don’t yet live in a world like that.

How is this any different than native apps that offer the same functionality? The article is about facebook, not emacs. A native facebook apps is a much bigger privacy concern. The native app still stores your data in the cloud so you don't control it. It still can be using 3rd party libraries that are doing more than their stated function. It can still be communicating with servers from all over the world. On top of all that it has raw packet access to your WiFi for scanning your entire network on all ports (web apps can't do that). It can scan for SSIDs to find your location (a web app can't do that). It can scan bluetooth to find out your location and/or proximity to others (a web app can't do that). On most OSes it can read most of your files (like say your private ssh keys) web apps can't do that. If you give it access to your photos to select one photo it can read all of them, web apps can't do that. On a web app you can easily add all kinds of mods via extensions to add or remove features because the web apps are based on a known structure (HTML). that's rarely true for native apps. For app in question, Facebook, see FBPurity as an example.

I am not sure that's what he or she was trying to say. Agree with everything you said about native apps. The question for me is if it's necessary for every page to run javascript, even if it doesn't have any app-like features, even if it's just a document. I would love to be able to turn off javascript and be able to browse the document-web without everything being broken. In the specific cases where I need dynamic or app-like behavior, then I can use javascript, or maybe even a separate app browser. https://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-...

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