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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

(Different person)

> Video/audio editors? IDE's? Debuggers? Image/3D editors? Compressor/decompressors? Terminal emulators? And so much more stuff.

Video I can understand, and anything that needs a real local terminal. On the other hand, audio, IDEs and debuggers, image editors, 3D editors, codecs, and remote terminals, nah.

My first use of most of those things was on a Performa 5200 whose CPU registers had lower bandwidth (though obviously better latency) than my phone's cellular 4G modem.

Web stuff may feels un-performant, but a lot of this is due to a mix of a thousand or so analytics libraries all competing with each other to spy on everything you do, plus some kind of reactive nonsense that isn't half as good as it wants the developers to think it is, plus zero incentive from the companies to the coders to make things fast.

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Ok, but that was surely a consequence of the time you lived through(?)

Or do you currently still specifically choose to use some web based app for most of what you've "discarded"? Are your 3d editors, sound editors, (or even players), image editors or compression/backup apps webviews? IDEs? Etc?

How about password managers? That's a big (stupid) one people use on web apps for some reason..

Because most "professionals" in areas that need these things seldom use web apps. Toy apps? MVPs? Toy marketing or social stuff? Toy video editors for the TikTok generation? Sure. But that's mostly for amateurish usage, at least for now.

Even terminals.. what do you use in webviews that's better than iterm, putty, ghostty, etc?

Like it or not, and as awesome as browsers and webviews have become, there's still a lot of performance left on the table there.

That's just imho of course, just finding it weird people being pro-web apps on hn, that used to be very pro native and pro performance :shrug:

Sometimes I'll run an emulator in the browser to experience the joy of the old UI.

Somehow, a web browser with a canvas whose pixels are populated by JS or Wasm in response to an emulator booting pre-Unix classic MacOS, is faster and less prone to nonsense than the native UI widgets I get from Apple today.

And that, right there, is the point. Wasm is better than I think you think it is. Web apps can run e.g. fluid dynamics simulation directly on the GPU when I need them to. Calculate and rasterise a complete isochrone map of all OpenStreetMap roadways in Berlin at 25 fps even when it's one of 50 tabs in two browsers. Very little in most people's lives is even close to being actually performance limited on a modern computer, the apparent limits we experience are mostly due to all the things I said in the previous comment.

Given how bad SwiftUI is, honestly, a browser can sometimes even be a performance boost. Thinking about it, not even SwiftUI: I had some cases back in the original iPad/ObjC/UIKit days, where the UX was faster in a webview than with native components.

> Even terminals.. what do you use in webviews that's better than iterm, putty, ghostty, etc?

"Better"? Why "better"? Parity is sufficient. Though exactly what performance issues do you even have in mind here such that you even encounter a performance limit in a console?

Also, I specifically put "real local terminal" and "video" in the "sure, native" list.

I put terminals in that list not for performance reasons, but because browsers don't want to play with file systems.

> Wasm is better than I think you think it is.

This is very likely to be true, even though I do know it's pretty awesome and I'm actually often surprised by what can be done in a browser these days, I'm definitely not that much up to date with all the latest tech.

And sorry, yes I somehow missed that you had terminals on the native list, my bad.

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