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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

> It makes web apps first class productivity applications.

They won’t be first-class as long as native UI still has the upper hand.

This battle is long won in favor of webtech in every realm but 3d/video editing/audio work/things that do gpu heavy lifting like game engines.

Outside those sort of spaces it’s hard to name a popular piece of software still on native that isn’t a wrapped webapp.

Microsoft Office apps, Java IDEs, text editors in general. Most of the time I spend with software is with non-web-UI applications.

To the extent that the battle has been won, the apps it has been won with are nevertheless second-class compared to native-level usability.

> Microsoft Office apps

Thought these were web wrappers now if you use the latest

> text editors in general

Definitely not in general, VSCode and Cursor are both webtech and are extremely popular. Only terminal editors are native and then beyond that you have things like SublimeText, Textmate which are extremely niche now.

> Java IDEs

Yeah those and XCode I guess, Java IDE is extremely niche compared to webdev.

> video editing

cough CapCut cough

In which way does native UI have the upper hand, do you think? To me it seems like a lot of users are largely indifferent to this aspect (e.g. so many applications nowadays being Electron/browser based). If browsers keep gaining capabilities then it seems like this gap will get even smaller.

I’ve never used a webapp that felt nicer than native software, it’s always very clearly a compromise.

I can't tell what's a web app and what's native these days. Are you sure you can?

I'd have a very good hit rate, it mostly comes down to knowledge of toolkits. There are native apps that use their own toolkit, mostly written in Rust these days, and they always are worse than traditional toolkits (accessibility, respecting platform settings, visually fitting in, etc). That same issue applies to webapps typically.

The way keyboard-only usage works, if it is workable at all, is usually a dead giveaway. As is the lack of dialog windows and traditional menus, and often latency.

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