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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

OT: Why is that Alphabet, Mozilla, Apple, etc can get together to create web standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform - only a browser is needed, but Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Canonical, etc can't get together to create standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform?

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You answered the question yourself: There is already a standard that allows anyone to create software that works cross-platform: the browser.

The browser is an extremely poor medium to deliver applications. It works, but barely, is a huge resource hog, fragile and it breaks way too often due to a lack of backwards compatibility between browser versions of the same manufacturer. I have a small app that I support and it's been fun to get it to work in the browser (instant cross platform support was indeed the driver) but the experience is still sub-par compared to what I could do on a local application.

this does not track with my experience, so possibly it's the nature of your app or the way it's coded. frameworks like react are notoriously crap. stick to pure html5/css/js and it can be extremely fast and light.

You could have clicked on my profile to find the app that you're criticizing unfairly. It does not use react, but it uses pure html5,css,js, it is extremely fast and light. And yet, there are things that it can not do simply because it runs in the browser, which is a poor operating system for a hard real time program to run under.

I did not criticize your app. I offered that your blanket statement that "The browser is an extremely poor medium to deliver applications" does not comport with my experience. And it looks like I nailed it, too. It is the nature of your application. Had you said "the browser does not offer a real time API which I need for my application", there would have been nothing to say. This is obviously true. Even native desktop apps provide an inadequate environment for "hard RT". So I suspect that is also not a true requirement, either.

Ah, the true Scotsman version of 'not that kind of app'.

Well, there are apps that you can only do native, not in a browser, we agree on that. But I also think that the browser is actually providing a very compelling standard OS with batteries included for many kinds of applications, and now there is even webGPU. I am currently building a local-first interactive theorem prover with built-in IDE as a PWA, in TypeScript, and you have really cool tools you can use as a foundation for something like this, such as ProseMirror and IndexedDB. Of course the raw prover can also be run from the command line via node. Claude Code is also very useful in this environment. Yes, different browsers are an issue, but so much works on all modern ones.

You ignored the points of the GP and made an invalid claim of NTS (as it's fairly clear that the "you" was not directed at you personally) due to your failure to read. I expected better from a long-time HN user.

Unfortunately, I think all these things are externalities - or at least, areas that don't impact revenue enough to get companies to change.

I too wish that software would be efficient, robust and long-lasting. But it seems that most people don't care about this enough (compared to other factors) to force change. (Alternatively, they are locked in to platforms they don't like to use.)

> There is already a standard that allows anyone to create software that works cross-platform: the browser.

Which one exactly ? IE ? Dillo ? Lynx ? Pale Moon ? Firefox version 126 ?

Apple make money from the App Store and from selling their hardware, so why should they want to invest on something that let people install software bypassing the App Store or that works on other platforms?

Alphabet make money from ads, so they want web pages, apps on Android and Chrome everywhere.

Mozilla make money from Google.

Microsoft make money from software licenses and subscriptions and from cloud services. They might be interested in cross platform installation.

At the moment what we have is PWA and WASM and icons on the desktop.

There are many projects that try to make cross-platform mobile apps easier, including Google's own Flutter. I haven't heard of them getting much cooperation from the teams working on Android or iOS, though.

At least for stuff that doesn't use device API's much, it seems like websites are the way to go. They're a whole lot easier to build than mobile apps.

The API surface becomes the lowest common denominator of all the platforms it supports, possibly with a path to support platform-native features, but probably in a way that’s necessarily not as good as native.

I think we already have plenty of avenue in ‘solutions’ like Electron to let people build bad apps.

Ah, I'm always up for a tangent.

The boring answer from Capt. Obvious. Incentive alignment.

That said, WebAssembly might be the trojan horse. While it started as a browser compile target, WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is extending it beyond browsers into filesystem, networking, etc. etc. etc.

Fingers crossed, we may get cross-platform standards by accident.

Simple. It is not in their interest to do this. It is a lot of work, for no revenue.

Given you have two of the same names on both sides of the list, it looks like your question is self-contradictory. Could you clarify?

Don’t we have the jvm?

It doesn't have enough levels of abstraction, and, conpared to electron, it uses too few resources to be considered as a viable target by real men.

Apple ain't getting their 30% when you're running shit in your browser.

this. webkit is intentionally hobbled and years behind the standards. browsers on iOS are forced to use webkit for ginned up security excuses/reasons so that no real browsers that implement full standards can complete with heavily taxed app store spyware.

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