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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

I mean, in what world aren't "PWAs, web apps and other web technologies" inferior to real apps? I have complex real-time 3D video games that do things like fluid simulation and have dynamic maps that take fewer system resources than any Electron or QtWebkit/QtWebEngine app I've got. I can use CSS for GTK and actually-native Qt, and they don't wreck my system as hard. I see no benefits to PWAs; it sure seems like Apple's doing everyone a favor by making them less common, and I say this as a Linux user who kinda likes having more professionally-crafted apps. I'm pretty much the target audience for them, given that if they don't exist, people are still going to make apps for Mac and Windows. And yet, I would sacrifice every single one of them without a second thought. They don't add enough benefit to be worth it.

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> I see no benefits to PWAs

Creator of https://rpgplayground.com here, which features game tech running in the browser, so I definitely disagree with this statement :).

Here is a list of benefits that I see:

1. One build runs everywhere, Windows, Linux, Mac, Chromebook (used a lot in schools), Android, iOS, I even have someone running it on an XBox web browser.

2. No download and install, so barrier to entry is way lower. Also great for locked down systems. "Wanna play my game? Play it here"

3. Everyone runs the latest version.

4. Easy update scheme: I update the website, and everyone gets the latest version.

5. Not giving away % of revenue to platform owners.

I code in Haxe, so I could easily build a native version for any platform. But I am a one man shop, and maintaining all those versions and updates is way more work.

The world is all about trade-offs, and claiming PWA's are either superioir or inferior is a very naive way of decision making.

>1. One build runs everywhere, Windows, Linux, Mac, Chromebook (used a lot in schools), Android, iOS, I even have someone running it on an XBox web browser.

This also exists outside of web development (e.g. Qt)

>2. No download and install

The client must download the source code, same as any other platform. The installation part occurs when the user had to first install a web browser before being able to use your software. Outside of a monstrous application, installation is almost instantaneous these days.

>3. Everyone runs the latest version.

Nothing new here. For instance web browsers: They download in the background and silently install upon next restart. Also, running the latest version isn't necessarily an advantage, especially if it wasn't the end user who installed that latest version or otherwise has no control over whether it gets installed or when.

>4. Easy update scheme: I update the website, and everyone gets the latest version.

This might be the only advantage. Though, if such deployment is a requirement, setting up the necessary servers to facilitate the communication with the client isn't nearly as difficult or complex as it was even 5 years ago.

>5. Not giving away % of revenue to platform owners.

Unless you're talking about an iPhone app, then this isn't a requirement.

>I see no benefits to PWAs

For games, sure, native is much better. But for any other app, which doesn't require a lot of rendering and simulation, PWAs are actually a great option.

You can have one codebase for both platforms. Through the use of Cordova you can actually use native apis very easily. Also, using PWAS gives you access to the thousands of useful packages in the npm ecosystem. How about the tens of thousands of themes you can use to enhance your app? Or things like Vuetify or TailwindUI to quickly craft attractive UIs

If you're not making an app which needs a lot of computational power I would say a PWA is a great option.

That is kind of the exact opposite of the point I was making. Games would be fine as PWAs in theory: nobody expects video games to use few resources or to be power-efficient. Anything else isn't a good fit, because PWAs are ridiculously bloated for fundamental reasons even for basic applications.

What do you mean by "ridiculously bloated"?

The very nature of HTML and CSS which are designed to display some text and maybe a few images make them ridiculously unsuited for literally anything else.

You as much as glance at a web page, and it causes a repaint and reflow of the page.

Everything else stems from that.

HTML+CSS is a layout system that has been refined and heavily used in many screen sizes for several decades now. Try to find an equivalent system that works from 4/8k down to 320px width in any native system.

I mean, there ARE downsides to using web tech, but as a flexible layout system that can gracefully describe very large ranges of targets I have not found it's equal.

> Try to find an equivalent system that works from 4/8k down to 320px width in any native system.

You probably mean literally every native system. Because it's not like native toolkits didn't exist on the same systems as HTML+CSS.

> a flexible layout system that can

There's significantly more that's required of UI than just layout. And HTML+CSS are horrendously bad for anything beyond a static page of text with images.

You just keep repeating that claim and don't bother to present an argument. There are plenty of effective dynamic web pages that are not painful to create as a counter point to your claim.

For layouts, I've used various toolkits including Qt, Java AWT and SWING, and Visual Basic way back when. Creating a GUI that scales gracefully on these, in my experience, is time consuming and highly difficult. Most everyone favors static layouts because of the challenges. Learning responsive design on a web page takes a bit of time but it has the tools to reasonably manage a variety of layouts on a wide range of screens.

I would even accept an individual native system's layout manager as a counter argument of something that is at least competitive. It really isn't an easy problem.

> You just keep repeating that claim and don't bother to present an argument.

These facts are obvious to anyone who has seen anything else besides just HTML+CSS.

Adding a simple box shadow on an element will trigger reflow in most browser engines [1] Efficiently animating anything that as much as breathes at layout is impossible. Efficiently displaying anything beyond a few hundred elements on a page? Equally impossible (and there are no virtual lists on the web).

But the actual argument is this: given "the most advanced and powerful layout system in the world that has no parallels anywhere else, it's so unique", why is it that most CSS frameworks struggle to implement anything beyond the most basic of controls (buttons, links, may be tabs)?

> Creating a GUI that scales gracefully on these, in my experience, is time consuming and highly difficult.

Ah yes. "Scales". Because this is the area that only HTML and CSS have to deal with. Because, you know, resizing windows didn't ever exist since the earliest days of GUIs.

However, being able to work at different sizes isn't what "scaling a GUI" means, or should mean. Desktop apps have been able to work at different sizes for close to 40 years now.

[1] https://csstriggers.com/box-shadow

Here's a good example! Open up this page in your web browser; not the site the thread is linking to, just the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576937

Opening it up, fresh, it's taking 49.9MB of memory for me. For a tab I've had open for a while, of the same page, it's doing 60MB. And that's despite it not being a "web application": it's barely a web page! So here I am, doing exactly what everyone claims I should be doing, and using a web browser for my web content. And one of the most spartan sites on the internet, Hacker News, has mildly-active threads that take up 60MB of memory. For the tab. Not for the browser, for the individual tab.

The best Electron application I've ever came across launched with 100MB of memory consumption and pegs a CPU core. That's not even getting into how nearly every single Electron application puts 150MB+ on your hard disk, because that in particular isn't incredibly relevant.

I (and I think most users) don't care about how much memory an individual webpage uses, as long as it feels fast.

I'm sure there are many like you who want applications to be frugal with memory and cpu consumptions, but I think most users don't really give a damn.

They care when the computer slows down and the battery drains faster.

I personally like having battery life and the ability to multitask. I don't think it's something that only non-technical users want, or even something particularly rare. Surely most users like their phones lasting longer on a single charge, given that's sort of the root of the discussion.

Memory consumption of that level has no noticeable impact on battery life.

There are bloated web apps that should be improved for sure, but they also exist with "native" languages.

The issue has always been runtime computations, PWAs are perfomant if you keep them low.

I wrote myself an ebook and webnovel reader PWA which tracks progress by pixels and percentage amongst other things. There is no noticeable difference between fbreader (native) and this angular app. I get the same amount of drain per hour as I repeatedly verified when I switched.

Just trying to understand you... When I open it, it takes 6.37 (sometimes 6.18) MB of memory. I look at the 'Memory'-tab in the webdev tools in FF browser. For a second I thought uBlock or NoScript made a difference, but when I disable these I get the same result of around 6 MB. What am I missing?

Using about:performance for Firefox 88.0.1 on GNU/Linux. As far as I know, this is the most accurate way of measuring single-tab performance on Firefox.

Thanks. I still hover on 5 or 6 MB. Your point still stands if you ask me, even simple webshit is unnecessarily heavy a lot of times.

Yeah, that is until you don’t want a webpage as an app. Proper accessibility, controls, behaviors, memory usage.

I can only applaud Apple. Please do that Cordova stuff on your own phone. There are enough frameworks that aren’t that bloated if you really don’t want to develop for a platform

Proper accessibility, controls, behaviors, memory usage

All things which you can implement in a pwa. Do you have any experience building native, hybrid or pwa apps?

> But for any other app, which doesn't require a lot of rendering and simulation, PWAs are actually a great option.

Slack and Spotify are both resource-hungry applications that would benefit immensely from being native applications. Yet we are stuck with the worlds laggiest IRC client and an application that you’re actually better off running in the browser so it doesn’t destroy your SSD (again).

Electron is somewhat different than a PWA. They are not the same.

Electron packages up its own browser and something akin to a node process along with your code. There is effectively no sandbox on Electron. Last I played with it the minimum bundle size is ~80MB, depending on the platform and feature set and it runs somewhat larger on disk after install.

A PWA uses the existing browser on your device and must abide by the browser's sandbox and limitations. It's basically running as a page tab but skinned to look like a native application.

For both Slack and Spotify, I would prefer a PWA over electron. They work fine within the sandbox and then it's simply smaller/faster and your browser, the one major dependency, updates separately. That's less bandwidth to keep everything up to date, less resources both on disk and in ram. Given you advocate using the browser for Spotify, it seems that you would prefer it to be a PWA as well.

There are pros and cons to both approaches, but from a resource perspective, PWAs are potentially quite lean. The last PWA I published has a download footprint of about ~800k, uses ~3MB on disk, and ~30-50MB of ram when running, and ~1s load time on my phone. It's pretty much a big ball of javascript, light on pics or media other than the icon set - but runs an inventory system and allows some modest camera assist from the device. Contrast that to a React-Native application I produced of the same complexity at a previous employer, it was 30MB download, 50MB on disk, and even more ram, and 3 s load time on my phone. PWAs potentially open faster than similarly complex native app if the browser is already running and in memory - which is a common case.

> Given you advocate using the browser for Spotify, it seems that you would prefer it to be a PWA as well

Ideally I’d like us to stop trying to force every single application into the browser when they don’t belong there. I prefer to use Spotify on web over the electron app only because it’s only marginally less-bad there, I’d prefer it more if it was a native application like Apple Music is because all my music is on disk anyways.

Even using Slack in a browser indicates how heavy it is. Abysmal.

Many mobile apps just exist to browse a certain web site (HN, Reddit, etc) at which point making a native app makes little sense if you're just copying the design of a site. This also extends to desktop (Spotify, Steam, etc). The problem with Electron (or CEF or QtWeb*) is that it's running an independent rendering engine adding a significant overhead. If you're already running a browser even complex web apps such as a WebGL sculpter[0] add a minimum usage on the session. Of course there's the problem of persistently running a web browser which may lead to high energy consumption.

[0]: https://stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/

Link to a post in this thread that I wrote partially as a response to yours but don't want to duplicate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27601802

On a whim, I also opened the front page of reddit (again, in my web browser that's already opened) and the tab is taking 140MB fresh.

Is this page resource usage on the browser or the total? Else, you used the browser's (about:performance in Firefox) or you system's task manager to get this figure? If the later, that is exactly what I meant with engine overhead. You should consider that initial figure shared among tabs/apps.

I used about:performance; I'm not stupid. Is there no expectation of good faith here?

Strange. It shows only 1.7MB on FF 89.0 (Linux, x64). That's why I thought you're checking the total memory. Then again the total in there is far smaller than what the system usage is, so this manager is unreliable.

I know we don’t do this here but this made me chuckle. Favoriting this.

Not to mention that PWAs/web apps, while being "open web technologies", are inferior in that [0] by default all the data/secret sauce is for all intents and purposes proprietary and outside the control of the user. Big whoops if you have an open web technology frontend if you cannot escape the platform, with your data, stay on an older version, etc.

[0] I'm aware of web apps that use local storage and other strategies to keep user data out of a silo, but these are the exception not the norm

The web is by far the most portable and secure application platform in history. There are definitely advantages to native apps, but you can't pretend that web apps don't have some major advantages.

> in what world aren't PWAs, web apps & other web technologies inferior to real apps?

Apple controls the iPhone ecosystem. That's how they're worse. It's the single most dictatorial move our industry has seen, and it's damaged our industry to the point we have to go through a single company to reach consumers.

The minute native Rust/WASM with custom painted UI and the ability to call device APIs lands, it's game over for app stores. Or it would be, if Apple would allow this stuff to exist on their platform. (They won't.)

No, it's not because of the iPhone ecosystem that PWAs are bad. It's not because of the iPhone ecosystem that web technologies are ridiculously bloated with no intention of actually fixing the problem. It's not because of the iPhone ecosystem that web apps are inferior to every other type of application you can find.

You can't blame every single problem on "the iPhone ecosystem."

I certainly don't like the iPhone or its software; this doesn't mean that it's somehow responsible for PulseAudio being bad. Not everything can be tied to the iPhone. Really!

I think in fine the PWA problem stems from a lack of education: some developers were exposed only to Javascript and think of it at the alpha and omega of programming. Ironically the web isn't even a platform for developing software to begin with. And because they can't be bothered to even try any other programming toolkit, they want everything else to come in the browser (GPU, SQL, USB, etc), duplicating existing OS functions in a weird half-assed, incomplete, buggy and security-wise questionable way. I don't know what the fix for that is, but probably taking what pure web developers say less seriously would be a good start (in this thread for example, the reference to NPM, a package manager known for the vulnerabilities it enable, is laughable).

Just want to point out for appreciation: Using in fine in an English sentence is fantastic and not done enough.

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