Hacker News Reader

Comment by obeattie | Hacker News Reader

So… what are you proposing? We go back to the web as it was in 1995?

I propose we give up on the flawed idea of "web apps", and go back to native applications. Mac OS, iOS, and Android show us that this is both possible and practical.

The web can continue to be what it was and should be, a set of interlinked documents to be interpreted by applications installed on the local computer.

Why not just properly sandbox web apps?

You'd have to give each web page its own sandbox, at which point installing/using it is no more convenient than a native application.

You'd lose portability across platform (OSX, Windows, Linux, each with a variety of browsers).

Web pages already have sandboxes.

Except open distribution and being automatically cross platform...

You're using a web application right now.

Aye, and it would be a much nicer experience if it were native.

Web apps are by definition more secure. Well, as secure as the browser, and those are very secure today.

Except for everyone who wants to use it outside of the select few OSs for which it would be written.

You think that's air you're breathing?

So... you're advocating that we roll back the last decade or so of web development.

Good luck with that.

Sure. Provide me a realistic way to provide an application across Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, iOS and platforms I haven't even considered with the same codebase (allowing for minor changes to coincide with the cross-platform hacks that go into CSS/JS) and it might be realistic.

But even then, we've still got to deal with the unwillingness of users to install applications versus their total willingness to visit a web page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com