Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with that argument is that you're assuming consistency with native platform standards is the dominant consideration. I contend that, today, it often is not. Many users are spending much of their time using web sites and applications rather than native ones; this trend does not appear to be in dispute here. Moreover, the basics of how web sites (and by extension web apps) work have a longer history of established conventions than any of the major native platforms; the likes of Jakob Nielsen were making the case for consistency and following user expectations more than two decades ago, long before the likes of iOS and Android and whatever we're calling Windows' UI today were glints in their respective creators' eyes.

Also, web technologies can perform just fine the vast majority of the time. Modern JS engines have excellent performance, obviously not rivalling expertly coded C and assembly, but certainly comparable to your average native application for most purposes. Modern browsers also have good support for hardware acceleration and can render UIs that respond quickly enough to user interactions that again for most purposes there is no perceptible delay or jank. Today we're looking towards WebAssembly as a vehicle for potentially more efficient languages and runtimes, though clearly that technology is still in its infancy and its future is far from certain. Now, you can undermine all of that potential if you bloat your web site/app with tens of megabytes of junk scripts that are all competing for resources and blocking stuff and phoning home and whatever, but that's not really the fault of the web technologies, it's just bad developers and/or bad managers creating a bad application.

> Moreover, the basics of how web sites (and by extension web apps) work have a longer history of established conventions than any of the major native platforms;

That "and by extension web apps" bit is completely wrong. The long-standing conventions of how web sites work are mostly irrelevant to fancy web apps, and to the extent that they are relevant, web apps break them left and right. Just look at how many web sites/apps hijack or break scrolling or the back button or the ability to middle-click on a link and get a new tab or the ability to highlight text. Web apps are all about breaking the usability standards for web sites and replacing them with a bastardized version of the usability conventions from various native OS toolkits. But in spite of that, nobody ever really expects drag and drop or rich copy and paste or any other data exchange mechanism to work between web apps.

Just look at how many web sites/apps hijack or break scrolling

Hardly any? That's been a minor trend in web sites for a while, but changing scroll behaviour for no good reason is widely regarded as an antipattern by UI professionals. I don't recall ever seeing normal scrolling behaviour subverted in anything I'd call a web application.

or the back button

This is a tricky one from a usability perspective, because some users see URLs as shortcuts to particular parts of a web application and expect the back button to behave accordingly as they navigate information in the app, while others think of the whole application as being a single page and expect the back button to just leave everything. But there is a whole set of browser APIs for managing that behaviour, and it's something a well-designed application will at least present in a consistent and logical way.

or the ability to middle-click on a link and get a new tab

This sounds like you're talking more about web sites than applications again, and again it also sounds like you're talking about bad design that web UI professionals would universally disagree with. It's usually caused by newbies who read some style-over-substance tutorial and decided that making links or buttons with elements other than the designated anchor and button ones that exist for that purpose was a good idea. After the first few glaring usability problems, they'll learn better.

or the ability to highlight text.

I don't really understand this one at all. The only times you wouldn't be able to highlight text in a web application would be if the designers have actively prevented it, for example to prevent selecting UI labels along with the content of a text field. This typically works exactly the same way as any native desktop application.

But in spite of that, nobody ever really expects drag and drop or rich copy and paste or any other data exchange mechanism to work between web apps.

I don't know what you mean here, either. Dragging and dropping text between web applications typically works fine. If by "rich copy and paste" you mean other more complicated data types, what happens is obviously highly context specific, but once again, this is the same story on native desktop applications. It's not as if you can copy a selection of spreadsheet cells and paste them into a drawing package with obvious and meaningful results either.

As a final comment, the examples you're talking about here all seem very "meta". As such, they're not particularly interesting to me, because as a UI developer working on a web app you generally get the expected behaviour by default with these kinds of things. Sure, some people can and do break them. They're just bad UI designers. Some people make native applications with shocking pink skins over the normal window dressing, too, but that doesn't mean all native apps are bad.

I keep hearing the "web technologies are fine, you're just using them wrong" refrain over and over again, but it's ultimately not very convincing. If it's true, then where are all the good web applications? I've certainly never seen any of them. Can you give an example?

If nobody can get Web technologies to deliver a good experience, then I'm not sure it matters that much whether or not it's possible in theory. Delivering a theoretically great user experience won't get you anywhere unless it also translates to practice.

What do you consider a good application? If you have never seen anything that would qualify on the Web then I have to ask what standards you are seeking and whether any software actually meets them.

At least for the purposes of comparing to web apps, the criteria would be: responsive/low-latency (responds to input quickly), fast (completes tasks quickly), uses resources proportional to the functionality it provides, and doesn't often hang or spend noticeable amounts of time waiting for a network request before responding to an action.

Applications that meet these criteria include: Thunderbird, KiCAD, VLC, Vim, tmux, Blender, evince, Handbrake, and Pidgin.

responsive/low-latency (responds to input quickly), fast (completes tasks quickly), uses resources proportional to the functionality it provides, and doesn't often hang or spend noticeable amounts of time waiting for a network request before responding to an action

That seems like a fairly low bar to clear. Aside from the network request issue, I think every web application I've worked on for a decade or more would tick all of those boxes, from intranet tools to browser-based interfaces embedded in device firmware. I'm sure there are many others in the industry who could say the same. A lot of the things I'm thinking of are for internal use, but in terms of public examples, you can just look at most of the successful big-name business SAAS applications, and they tend to be strong on these requirements as well. Ease of use is a huge selling point for attracting customers, and no-one is winning points by being clunky in their web GUI in 2020.

Network speed and reliability is a different issue, and obviously many web applications are particularly vulnerable to problems there because they have such a strong communication element. But then the same is true of native applications that are for communication or a front-end to a client-server system like a central database.

Applications that meet these criteria include: Thunderbird, KiCAD, VLC, Vim, tmux, Blender, evince, Handbrake, and Pidgin.

That's an interesting set of examples. The other point under discussion was about whether web applications cause usability problems by deviating from native platform UI conventions. I can't help noticing that several of the native applications you mentioned there do exactly that.

For example, Blender's UI was infamous for being so unusual that anyone coming from other 3D modelling software found it hard to use, and for looking and behaving nothing like a conventional native application on a platform like Windows. Eventually, that became so much of a problem that they basically rewrote the whole UI layer to work in more conventional ways.

Handbrake has its good points, but its interface looks like a GUI from the early 2000s where the designer just threw as many different types of control onto a form layout as they could manage.

Thunderbird also has its good points, but its UI is incredibly glitchy in some areas (dragging and dropping comes to mind) and it definitely fails to meet your fast and responsive criteria at times.

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