> For JavaScript it’s a bit harder.
"We should probably just stop doing it" works for me.
"We should probably just stop doing it" works for me.
The idea of security "sandboxes" is quaint, but have been defeated pretty much since their inception. And the only reason we have "frontend developers" rather than just "developers" is HTML/CSS/JS/DOM/etc is a byzantine relic we refuse to let go of. Just let us deliver regular-old apps to users and control how they're displayed in regular programming languages. Let users can find any app in any online marketplace based on open standards.
Think Autodesk products. Certain parts (wasm modules) only load when you hover over a menu while overall app loads within milliseconds because it just has the main window and such.
HTML is declarative. The machine understands it. I like things machines can understand and optimize. Things that you can write automated tools to work with because it's not a full turing machine. If you want to make a screen reader, you can. If you want to reflow for mobile in a better way, you can, because you know what's text and what's an image.
Just giving people a programming environment and the ability to draw some pixels, the browser has no idea what the intent is. There's nothing to optimize unless the individual sites do, and I doubt they have Google and Mozilla's budget.
We already have too many unnecessary powerful imperative systems out there.
For example, picking up more elements of semantic web and distributed systems and leveraging interconnected devices.
It's also highly standardized. Regular programming languages have dozens of GUI toolkits, or at least one per platform.
I'd rather we go the other way, and build the browser into the OS, so that desktop apps just serve a perfectly standard web server, with an API to launch a special OS client with slightly more native integration(Toolbar icons, closing the process when the browser closes, etc), to make native app dev easier and hopefully more popular.
Security sandboxes mostly work. People aren't constantly getting viruses from clicking the wrong link, at least not quite as much. They're not perfect, but they're better than having to completely trust 100 different sites unsandboxed, and they can be improved. I'd rather have crappy security than no security at all.
Native mobile apps thrive despite this magical web browser working everywhere, because the web browser simply doesn't do what native apps do. You may enjoy that, but a million businesses and billions of users out there don't agree, because they use native apps. There were 255 billion native mobile app downloads in 2022, generating billions in revenue. That's not a mistake or accident; that's a market filling a need.
If we really want an application platform that works everywhere, then let's stop dicking around with these stupid document hypertext viewers and build a real app platform that works everywhere.
There’s also user behavior. Many users are conditioned to get software through the App Store. I’ve seen this be a driving factor for quite a few web native applications spinning up native dev teams and shipping native clients.
Many folks are surprised to see just how far you can push a browser app and how small the gap between web and browser has become for well built applications, including native-like things like Bluetooth, NFC, USB, etc. (see: https://youmightnotneedelectron.com/)
Have hacked with quite a few devs/companies that had a fully functioning offline capable web native application. The most requested feature they’d get? “I want to download it from the App Store.” (Usually in the form of “I can’t find your app in the App Store”)
I suspect this is why the PWA experience on mobile devices hasn’t been well paved and why some App Store policies call out “don’t just wrap a browser view in a native app” - they want to keep users coming in the front door of a marketplace where they collect a cut off the top of all transactions.
For mobile apps you can use webview component which will use system browser. You don't need to ship the entire browser (actually you can't even do that on iOS).
But you're not allowed to for iOS: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#min...
There are still tons of things that don't need an app. Things that are inherently online and not accessed frequently work fine as sites.
The web doesn't limit what you can do that much, it limits how you can do it, which I think is a good thing. Less to break (Android API levels have the same effect) with fewer original lines of code. Less focus on clever and interesting code and more focus on UI and features (Although they try their best to reinvent the same js framework 1000 times).
A lot of the limitations are probably just Mozzilla hating anything that could be used for tracking, and not trusting users to manage permissions. The trend has been pretty strongly towards making the web very close to native apps, with all kinds of APIs.
Native apps fill a use case very well, that the web does not. That doesn't make the web obsolete.
Don't denigrate Mozilla for protecting users. There are a lot of privacy issues that can't be addressed by permissions models, Android serves as an example of that. Enumeration is not effective.
If Mozilla are standing in the way of invasive webpages, more power to them.
That is exactly what standardization means, by definition, both dictionary and colloquially.
This didn't work out that great with MSIE.
But it seems to have worked great for years for Chromebooks!
Browsers have a 2D renderer (canvas) and you can write your GUI code in C++, Rust, or whatever and compile it to WASM. Some widget toolkits for this even exist already. If this were a superior model it would have taken over by now? I guess you are after deeper integration with the desktop environment?
The whole point of properly developing web apps is that html/css indicates a certain level of semantic understanding which allows for different interpretation in different contexts.
If you build a web app well, you build it to be a good experience on a computer for a power user with a huge screen and a keyboard for shortcuts, good for a user on a tiny touch screen, good for a blind person who doesn’t use a screen, and good for robots to parse and index. It should even be good for someone on an iPad with a mouse or a pencil which interprets the whole concept of the mouse differently from the desktop user’s mouse.
The agreed-upon semantics of HTML and the separation of visual styling into CSS is what allows you to take a step beyond just building an app and add a layer of “say what you mean” such that human and non-human users can re-interpret it into their own devices, use cases, and specific needs.
Web frontends are at their best when you don’t expect to perfectly control the end user experience, but try to convey the semantic meaning as perfectly as you can so it can be interpreted into good experiences even in situations where the display is wildly different than originally intended.