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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

As a counterpoint, many systems that were originally implemented as native desktop applications have since been migrated to the web. The motivation for this shift is not particularly strong from a technical standpoint, but it is a practical one: deploying native applications is simply too costly.

The web finally provides a widespread standard for deploying applications inexpensively. Unfortunately, the technology used to build user interfaces for the web remains somewhat mediocre.

It’s unfortunate that history took some wrong turns with X11, Java, Flash, Silverlight, .NET, and countless other alternatives that I haven’t personally lived through.

Hopefully, someone will eventually find a way to make developing web applications comfortable and the broader community will embrace it.

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I think that using browser as the way to, essentially, deliver desktop LOB apps to the users seamlessly, updates and all, makes perfect sense. Writing those apps in HTML/CSS/JS, not so much - it's forced on us because that's the only stack that browsers have historically supported, but even with all the app-centric additions to HTML over the past two decades, it's clearly not designed for them first and it shows.

I hope that, in the long term, wasm and canvas (or something similar) will gradually take over this niche. Frameworks like Avalonia already let you write a desktop app and then surface it in the browser, today. This stuff is still rough around the edges, particularly wrt accessibility, but there's nothing unsolvable there in principle, it just needs time and effort (and money).

Nothing wrong with Flash and Silverlight except each being controlled by a single company. I liked those technologies. Adobe Flex was very nice to program in and use for it's time.

Both were absurdly slow and resource intensive.

Nothing got my old iMac G5 whipped into a frenzy like loading a page that had Flash on it somewhere. I’m not kidding when I say that there were many areas in World of Warcraft, a full-fat seamless open world 3D MMORPG, that didn’t make its fans as angry as Flash could manage to.

I was so happy when it finally started to disappear. That kind of sheer disregard for my system resources is inexcusable.

I wonder what could have been if it had had the same effort applied to optimize it as JavaScript did.

It probably could’ve been great, but unfortunately such a thing would’ve been unlikely at best with Flash being solely controlled by Adobe. Not only does that company have a disinclination towards optimization that persists to this day, but with there having been no alternative implementations of Flash, there was no possibility of other organizations taking up that torch or for there to be competition between implementations driving things forward.

Flash was a lot of things, but also, at the same time, neither of these things. (You could come across poorly coded and thus poorly performing apps, but that wasn’t the standard).

Modern day SPAs are far, far worse offenders when it comes to smothering resources.

My experience circa. 2008/9 was it was fine (used it on a commercial app in lieu of good enough web standards for the featureset). It was fast and reactive for an app-like experience.

Games were made in flash so it can't be that slow.

Maybe slow for time to load. I think we got that down a bit and this wasn't to render content but a utility for a signed up user.

It was OK on Windows. It sucked on any other platform. And it was a security disaster.

They were resource intensive (though probably less so than yr average React based site these days) but Flash, especially post AS3, was an order of magnitude or two faster than JS + html/svg/canvas at the time. It was years after the death of Flash that standards based tech finally caught up.

The flash player leaked memory. The longer-running the app, the more noticeable it was. I believe this is why Adobe Air (flash player packaged as deliverable) failed.

As for the speed of the flash player itself it was quite good.

Just like browsers now.

I’m making a web game and using html, css and vanilla javascript for the UI is fine. I have transitions, sounds and everything is very fast without any of the bloat. The actual game itself is in canvas but everything else is standard web stuff.

> I'm making a web game and using html, css and vanilla javascript

Nice work. Reminds me of "A Dark Room" and how a simple mostly-text interface with a bit of HTML/CSS/JS can have such a big impact.

https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

> deploying native applications is simply too costly.

I do not understand why people hold this impression, especially in corporate environments.

Windows supports both system and per-user deployments; the latter so you don't even need administrator rights. And with Intune, deployments can be pulled or pushed.

Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's preinstalled on the operating system.

Even ClickOnce deployments -- which you can deploy on the web or on a file share -- pretty much make deployments painless.

EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

We have 2 main products: a SaaS and a desktop app (1mln+ users combined). It's a pain in the ass to support the desktop app:

- many people refuse to upgrade for various reasons so we have to support ancient versions (especially for important clients), for stuff like license activations etc.

- various misconfigurations (or OS updates) on Windows can make the app suddenly crash and burn - and you waste time investigating the problem. My favorite recent bug: the app works OK everywhere except on some Japanese systems where it just crashes with access violation (see the next bullet point)

- debugging is hard, because you don't have immediate access to the machine where the bug triggered

- originally it was built 100% for Windows but now we have people asking for a MacOS port and it's a lot of work

- people crack our protection 1 day after release and can use it without paying

SaaS has none of those problems:

- people are used to the fact that SaaS applications are regularly updated and can't refuse to upgrade

- modern browsers are already cross-platform

- browser incompatibilities are easier to resolve

- you debug your own, well-known environment

- if someone doesn't play by the rules, you just restrict access with 1 button

You could of course also make your desktop app auto update without offering a way to refuse. Or you could make it display an error, if the user accesses it without being at the newest version, and block all further interaction. Those are considered impolite, but it seems you are doing it anyway in your web app already.

Even the most friction-free ClickOnce deployment is going to be more of a deployment hassle than "hey, users, you know how you go to https://subdomain.local-intranet/place to add or subtract items from the inventory database? Well, continue doing that".

The webapp doesn't care if someone's machine was down overnight or if the paranoid lady in design managed to install some local "antivirus" which blocked the updated rollout or if the manager of sales has some unique setting on his machine which for some inscrutable reason does silly things to the new version. If their web browser works, the inventory database works for them, and they're on the latest version. If their web browser doesn't work, well, your support teams would have had to eventually take care of that anyway.

Some people should probably only be given thin clients, because they are too inept to be allowed to handle anything else.

Not sure yet how to solve this problem on the Internet yet though. How can we prevent uninformed masses from creating incentives for businesses, that turn the web into a dystopia?

The web browser is not some magic tool that is always guaranteed to work. Group policy alone can wreck total havoc on web apps on all the major browsers.

This would be noticed immediately when all of the workers under the group policy try to access their email in the morning

That sounds nice and it probably works fine if you're targeting a single business running Windows, but targeting Mac, Windows and Linux remains more difficult, no?

And is there even a guarantee that your deploy will be rolled out in X minutes?

Version skew remains one of the biggest sources of catastrophic bugs at the company I work for, and that's not even taking into client app ver, just skew between the several services we have. Once you add client app ver, we have to support things for 3 years.

At my one-person company I just do a Kubernetes deploy, it goes out in a couple minutes and everyone has the latest ver whether they like it or not. I don't have the resources to maintain a dozen versions simultaneously.

There’s a hidden cost in web applications as well: you lose the value of the operating systems application language. Every website and thus electron app suffers from this. There’s no standard place for settings, buttons and windows don’t behave normally. There’s a lot of value in native apps in usability just in it sharing the same UX language as the operating system. Sadly this is mostly dead for new applications.

Building a game for multiple platforms for steam is way more work than building a single web app. Builting the game often requires unique settings for each platform, machines for each target platform, testing on each target platform, dealing with bugs on each target platform. Getting noterized/certified on each

> EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

How many games are multi-platform on steam? Checking the top 20 current most played games, 14 of them are windows only. If it's so easy to be multi-platform, why would 14 of the top 20 games not be multi-platform? Oh, it's because it's NOT EASY. Conversely, web apps are cross platform by default.

Only 2 of the top 20 games supported 3 platforms (windows, mac, steam-deck). 1 was windows+steam-deck, 3 were windows+mac

> For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

Because Valve puts lots of time and money into making it work for their customers (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/graphs/contributors), time and money that the average small business can't afford.

Here's a good example: I used Weylus which turns any touch device (phone, tablet etc) into a drawing tablet + screen mirror. It can be used to turn your iPad into a second monitor or as a touch device for your laptop.

Weylus gives you a URL that you can visit on the device and instantly use it. Try doing that with native apps. They'd need native apps for Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android... get them on the app stores too, support all the different Linux distros... or just a single URL that works instantly anywhere.

Steam works for the same reason the App Store works, it targets mostly a single platform (Windows) and all dependencies are bundled in. The Steam client itself is a web app running on the chrome engine, though.

In large corporate environments I agree but small companies still mostly don’t have central management of end user computers. They order a computer from Dell and use it as delivered. Much easier to just access everything via a browser that way.

> Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's preinstalled on the operating system.

The last .NET version to be deployed this way has a 10 year old feature set. Nowadays you bundle the parts of .NET you need with the application.

You can still do system wide deployments with .NET Core, or .NET 5+, as you prefer to call it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/window...

Of course. I was strictly refering to .NET preinstalled in Windows as per the comment I replied to, which I believe only applies to Framework 4.8.

Although, on re-read, maybe they meant there's a good chance another application already installed it? This I wouldn't agree with, as applications often insist on installing different versions of the system-wide runtime, even for the same major version.

It doesn't usually happen (on Windows but realistically elsewhere too) unless you publish an application as self-contained.

To be specific, .NET install is version-aware and would manage those side by side, unless the destination folder is overridden.

> please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

if you look into the support forums on steam for any random game you'll find lots of complaints about stability and crashes, many of which are likely to be esoteric system-specific problems.

That’s a very ironic example given that the Steam Client is a web-app hosted in Chromium.

I get the impression this is said by people who observe large enterprises or don't have good device management. I work for a big company that deploys proper MDM to our Macs and PCs, and as long as the application is packaged correctly, they sure can push stuff out fast and without user intervention, including killing a running process if they so choose. Making an app that packages well is also hard, but that's not on those who push them to environments.

I love ClickOnce and am amazed that it never got that popular. Installs and updates are seamless.

I wrote an inventory management program for my father's hazardous waste company. Used .net mvc as the backend, WPF as the frontend. WPF sucks in many ways, but I got it working and have had zero complaints.

I built that program almost 20 years ago. Until last year I spend maybe 5-6 hours total in maintenance, mostly ssl cert updates. Let that sink in.

> it's preinstalled on the operating system.

Not on my computers. At home, or at work

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