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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

Can you guarantee it'll run on the same machine, with the same browser, in 5 years, with no changes?

Win32 is bedrock, the web is quicksand. Look at "HTTPS everywhere" and "you don't need FTP any more", which did little in terms of actual security, but broke almost everything in some small way.

The web doesn't value legacy. It's a petulant 22 year old, that thinks it knows everything, and does stuff deliberately against the advice of those with more experience.

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You are completely exaggerating the backwards-compatibility issues that web developers face. There are web applications I wrote 15 years ago that are still working today, in modern browsers, with zero changes. And I wasn't nearly experienced as I am today, and didn't even think about future-proofing anything.

Is the web as stable as Win32? No, of course it's not. But a page with 150 inputs isn't anything that requires cutting-edge web technologies. It'll work just as well today as it'll work in 5 years.

I'm not sure backwards compatibility is necessarily the main issue - I agree web apps built 15 years ago are reasonably likely to still function today but user expectations have changed a lot and they will feel like apps that are anachronistic. Plus there are often issues with using older SSL protocols , certs signed by no-longer trusted root CAs, and of choose anything using Flash or ActiveX controls etc. is almost certainly now broken beyond repair. The other difference is that users expect web apps to keep working using a variety of browsers (that are constantly evolving) and the backend hosting side posts presents challenges in terms of keeping it running in the face of changing hosting providers, security and availability concerns, cost etc. etc. On that basis I'd agree a desktop app built now is far more likely to still be working as expected with zero maintenance in 15 years time than a web-based one.

The whole motto of the web is “don’t break the web”. Backwards compatibility is taken very seriously. If a new browser version breaks an old site it’s a bug.

I'm not a huge fan of the web in general, but your assertions here are, plainly, incorrect.

Yes. In fact the entire javascript toolchain that HN is always bemoaning is there to make sure that an application runs on 15 year old browsers just fine.

Really, yes. Use plain html, no CSS, no JavaScript, CGI implemented in some boring language, and plain http without ssl on the intranet and require vpn to connect from the outside.

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