Hacker News Reader

Comment by corytheboyd | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but learn from why the Electrons of the world are winning. It’s because browsers are already what you would get after reinventing the wheel all the way to its logical conclusion— a highly customizable, generic application runner. Let’s not throw that away and make an Nth new thing. HTML/CSS/JS are good enough abstractions with great implementations, and it’s easy to build applications against this. Portability is already solved too. Yes, we can do better than shipping each application with an embedded web browser executable, there are huge jumps being made all the time with native web view frameworks. Personally, I think the ship has sailed on making the “perfect” framework, let’s pick the one that’s already winning and make it the best we can.

View on HN

Electron/web still has the glaring issue of its primitives being, well, too primitive. They’re great for documents and lighter “web 2.0” apps but have a long way to go for the purposes of replacing full fat desktop UI frameworks.

This is actually a big factor in why web apps have the perception of being bloated. Basic widgets being missing means that everybody and their dog has their own custom implementations, nearly all of which are somewhat slapdash in nature due to speed of implementation being prioritized over quality. They never meaningfully improve either since there’s little sharing of efforts, with everybody instead preferring to reinvent wheels for themselves.

If the platform provided a more robust set of widgets, much of these problems would go away since devs would be using those instead either as-is or with light cosmetic customizations. Over time the browser implementations would get better and all users would benefit with more performant, less buggy apps.

Right, that’s what I’m getting when I say this:

> […] pick the one that’s already winning and make it the best we can.

I agree, it can be much better. Tons of incremental improvements have been made, and should continue being made.

I too would like to see browser close the gap completely, supporting everything needed to build real applications, not hacked together applications that accidentally work. We seem so close…

This is what I've been saying for a long time. HTML remains too primitive in its support for rich UI apps.

The main problem I think is what you have identified: we need sophisticated composable widgets with practical and sensible defaults, that are also really customizable with scoped CSS, built right into the browser. This alone would be the biggest QOL improvement as far as web development goes, in several generations. I really don't know why this is not the highest priority for the W3C

The only reason I figure that it hasn’t been prioritized is that it’s not flashy or sexy and has zero gee-whiz factor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com