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Comment by garganzol | Hacker News Reader

The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich.

What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-level windows.

Another PITA: Electron apps repeatedly bundle large portions of Chromium, leading to unnecessary overhead. Those duplicated modules lead to bloated RAM usage: every app has its own Chromium copy and OS must keep all that zoo in RAM without a possibility of reusing the otherwise shareable parts.

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HTML and CSS are also absurdly hard to actually do anything useful with or interactive compared to normal desktop or app frameworks.

Orders of magnitude more BS, plumbing, awkwardness, head scratching, etc.

That was indeed a pain point, but not anymore after CSS flex layout became available some 10 years ago. It's not worse than WPF for sure. It's even better than WPF because you have access to tons of UI components and toolkits that work everywhere.

Uh huh.

I think you're comparing hand-writing an HTML/CSS interface to the WYSIWYG form editor of Qt or Visual Studio? Because hand writing a GUI in Qt/QML/C++/.NET is not any easier than writing it in HTML. There are tons of boilerplate and special markup to learn. The magical editor just hides all the plumbing from you.

I'll grant you that the lack of good WYSIWYG designers for working on web/electron apps is appalling, it's like RAD peaked in 1998 with VB6 and it's been downhill ever since.

Not having to round trip through ACL/security checks.

Not having to deal with state management.

Not having to deal with browser compatibility issues (and mobile vs desktop).

Not having to deal with weird input validation stuff dual layer stuff that is inherent in web apps, but not a big deal elsewhere.

Not having to deal with laggy and unstable connections at the UI layer.

Etc, etc.

There's a competing webapp-wrapper framework that explicitly uses the platform's own browser, but developers don't like being at the mercy of whatever the OS ships...

not exactly the same, but worth noting that in a spectacular display of being too early, microsoft shipped this 30 years ago (active desktop in 1997 merged the windows explorer with internet explorer, turning folders into web pages).

It is despised for the same reason web based UI is despised today. Firefox OS was also “too early” and failed.

It was more despised for being a gaping security hole than anything else, as I recall - the things you could do with it were really neat demos, but even back then, I said "I am not loading a random website that can access local things every time I log in".

I've been hearing that for 10+ years. This is not going to happen.

This has already happened de-facto. Optimize it properly, and the whole problem disappears.

That’s the strategy of 20 years ago.

> sufficiently performant

In no universe is HTML performant compared to actual desktop applications. It sucks big time.

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