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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

If you think too hard about this, you come back around to Alan Kay's quote about how people who are really serious about software should build their own hardware. Web applications, and in general loading pretty much anything over the network, is a horrible, no-good, really bad user experience, and it always will be. The only way to really respect the user is with native applications that are local-first, and if you take that really far, you build (at the very least) peripherals to make it even better.

The number of companies that have this much respect for the user is vanishingly small.

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>> The number of companies that have this much respect for the user is vanishingly small.

I think companies shifted to online apps because #1 it solved the copy protection problem. FOSS apps are not in any hurry to become centralized because they dont care about that issue.

Local apps and data are a huge benefit of FOSS and I think every app website should at least mention that.

"Local app. No ads. You own your data."

Another important reason to move to online applications is that you can change the terms of the deal at any time. This may sound more nefarious than it needs to be, it just means you do not have to commit fully to your licensing terms before the first deal is made, which is tempting for just about anyone.

Software I don’t have to install at all “respects me” the most.

Native software being an optimum is mostly an engineer fantasy that comes from imagining what you can build.

In reality that means having to install software like Meta’s WhatsApp, Zoom, and other crap I’d rather run in a browser tab.

I want very little software running natively on my machine.

Yes, amen. The more invasive and abusive software gets, the less I want it running on my machine natively. Native installed applications for me now are limited only to apps I trust, and even those need to have a reason to be native apps rather than web apps to get a place in my app drawer

Your browser is acting like a condom, in that respect (pun not intended).

Yes, there are many cases when condoms are indicative of respect between parties. But a great many people would disagree that the best, most respectful relationships involve condoms.

> Meta

Does not sell or operate respectful software. I will agree with you that it's best to run it in a browser (or similar sandbox).

Desktop operating systems really dropped the ball on protecting us from the software we run. Even mobile OSs are so-so. So the browser is the only protection we reasonably have.

I think this is sad.

You mean you’d rather run unverified scripts using a good order of magnitude more resources with a slower experience and have an entire sandboxing contraption to keep said unverified scripts from doing anything to your machine…

I know the browser is convenient, but frankly, its been a horror show of resource usage and vulnerabilities and pathetic performance

The #1 reason the web experience universally sucks today is because companies add an absurd amount of third-party code on their pages for tracking, advertisement, spying on you or whatever non-essential purpose. That, plus an excessive/unnecessary amount of visual decoration.

The idea that somehow those companies would respect your privacy were they running a native app is extremely naive.

We can already see this problem on video games, where copy protection became resource-heavy enough to cause performance issues.

Web apps are great until you want to revert to an older version from before they became actively user-hostile or continue to use them past EoL or company demise.

In contrast as long as you have a native binary, one way or another you can make the thing run and nobody can stop you.

Yes because users don't appreciate this enough to pay for the time this takes.

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