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Comment by eschaton | Hacker News Reader

Yes, apps, which web pages aren’t no matter how much web designers want to pretend they are.

For many places where apps would previously be accepted users don't want native applications anymore.

For work other than some very industry specific high performance software most businesses software is web based, and users ( those paying the bills anyways ) want them to be web based because it is much more portable and easy to deploy.

They actually are though, in reality. Your point is what should they be, not what they actually are. The truth of the situation is that webpages _actually are_ applications now, due to the new features the browsers have added to facilitate that

I actually work at Qt and many of our new products are web apps

That’s too bad, but not unexpected given that Qt’s itself a non-native toolkit anywhere other than Linux that developers on those other platforms shouldn’t touch.

Okay so you actually have no cross platform suggestion??

Cross-platform frameworks are inevitably crap. If you really need to run an application on multiple platforms, write a cross-platform core and implement the human interface atop it for each platform using each platform’s native frameworks and languages.

The result is always a better product with happier users. If you don’t want to invest in that, you should at minimum be willing to admit to yourself that you’re OK with giving your users something subpar because it’s to your advantage to do so.

HTML + CSS + JS :^)

Web pages mostly aren't applications though. Like people will sometimes post links to corporate engineering blogs here that require javascript (Uber comes to mind). It's purely a document; there's no interactivity at all. Making it an "application" is just incompetence (it's more expensive to develop and gives a worse user experience).

It might be true that applications actually are web pages now (e.g. Slack, WebEx), but I almost never encounter web pages that are actually applications.

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