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Comment by smokey_circles | Hacker News Reader

>I wish there was a solution for those of us who develop web interfaces for embedded products designed to live on LAN, often without any internet access and no well defined domain name.

Don't use the browser?

I understand the temptation to use the browser, but this is the price you pay for using someone else's platform: They're free to close whatever door they want.

HTML renderers are dime a dozen. Electron is a thing. Serve the HTML using _another_renderer.

JavaFX isn't bad either but I'm not gonna sell anyone on that front because I don't even do it, but the option is there.

Please stop using my browser in obscure and painful ways just so you can (understandably) avoid having to write a native UI.

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I would much rather a web UI, please. A router, webcam, network storage, firewall, etc. that responds on ports 80 or 443 and serves up a usable web interface is a dream , all you need is a username and password and you can guess the rest.

The distant past where you needed a desktop program, and that needed a login to the manufacturer's website and a support contract to download, and it's never native it always needs Java and must be 3 versions out of date to work, then needs fiddling with Java's excrable and innumerable "security" prompts, then uncommon ports to be opened, and the older the device is the more likely it is to not work with UAC and need to run with Admin rights and depend on old versions of libraries, and then you end up with one carefully curated fossilised-in-amber management VM for that specific device; that time was much much much worse.

A 3D printer where you need CAD software to make much use of it, fine, have a desktop program. A thing which only needs an IP address for management and maybe it to talk to cloud services, browser web management absolutely any day please.

Telling users that, in order to connect their new router to the internet they must first download your native app from the internet... sounds like a non-ideal design?

To be fair, my current ISP (xFinity) and my previous ISP (Google Fi) both technically support some kind of web interface, but both push hard to get you to download their app and use that instead.

I had no problem (in either case) just downloading the app and using it to set up my networks. Most people know how app stores work now.

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