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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Such as?

SPA views transitions

Web Serial, WebUSB, WebVR to name a few.

Why? Web usb and web serial are awesome for point of sale applications. To interface with scanners, receipt/ticket printers, rfid, …

It’s so much easier to interface all that hardware just from an intranet website, instead of rolling out your own native code to thousands of different devices with different operating systems. We did that in the past, now they all just run chrome.

This mentality of shoving everything in the browser because native is too hard or something is why we're in this mess. The web was invented as a presentation layer for information, not a VM that executes arbitrary remote code and can talk to hardware.

So finding an easier way for hard problems is a sign of weakness? Lol…

If you consider other consequences that result then it can be "weakness" to take an easier path. I won't use ridiculous examples, but many bad things have happened because it was easier.

> The web was invented as a presentation layer for information, not a VM that executes arbitrary remote code and can talk to hardware.

The wheel was almost certainly not invented for the automobile, and yet, your car has four of them.

Indeed. Yet you don't have wheels on your hat. So there's a point where using a tool solely based on ubiquity becomes absurd.

People aren't doing this on the web for it's ubiquity, they are doing it because application distribution in the non-web ecosystem sucks. And because as bad as HTML and CSS is, native UI frameworks are even worse for most use cases.

If you don't like how all the applications are built on the web, by all means, provide a native alternative that's better.

Microsoft under Ballmer would have loved something like that, and spent a lot of money on trying to beat the web.

That ship has sailed. It has turned into a big whale with shipping containers on it's back.

The web is an application platform. It is really the remnants of its history as a document presentation platform that makes it add all these ultra high level declarative features that make up the bulk of the complexity of a browser. Ironically, these features, much more than scripting, also make up the bulk of the attack surface for browser exploits. Features like USB and VR are not the problem, you can just turn them off and everything still works, but one little change to CSS layouting can turn a web page into salad.

"This mess" being the greatest period of technology in history. Web browsers have become the most important and most empowering tools ever built. I'm really not convinced we should reverse that for some old man unix philosophy rant.

We are not building things for the technology sake. The user comes first, usability and accessibility is paramount. That's where we work around. History has shown is that it's easier to teach the browser new tricks than to make native easier to use. I want to:

go to some website => solve problem => finish

without extra steps. As a user I usually really don't care, I just am not interested in the problem and I am already spending too much time with stuff I am not interested in.

We use webusb and webserial in an internal tool as an easy way to distribute a cross platform way to flash an embedded device. It works great for supporting platforms which aren't used by the majority of our developers (Linux). I'm sure there are other ways to write a portable application, but the web route is a lot simpler.

I really hope we never remove these API surfaces from the web API surface.

you could argue that flash fell under this category, but that also perfectly demonstrates how much of the web was made inaccessible as a result of removing it

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