Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

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The shocking, unprecedented, world-changing difference that the web brings is that on the web all you have to do is click a link and your computer downloads, "installs", and runs a program. No manual installation necessary, no upgrades, no installers or wizards. No delay. This process is safe -- the page is sandboxed and can't interfere with the rest of your machine. And these things can be instantly shared! All I have to do is paste a bit of text to my friends and it turns into another clickable link that's only a touch away.

Engineers frequently undervalue this feature, especially considering the things that the web give up in order to achieve it. So yes, it's a pain in the ass to get that div to align correctly but in exchange you get to run instantly and almost everywhere [1].

Relevant: http://xkcd.com/1367/

[1] Depending on your target audience, old browsers might be a major problem (China), but the browser landscape is rapidly improving in terms of a minimum expected set of features.

That's the theory.

The practice is that

- you give your precious data to third parties

- that the safety problem now shifts from keeping your computer safe to keeping data in the hands of third parties safe (and this does not always play out in the way we would like, see codespaces for a recent example)

- that even the client side safety is a problem, the 'distribution advantages' have also been recognized widely by the blackhats.

- that we end up being tracked from here to Tokio and that the web is rapidly turning into a series of silos that try to have as little as possible to do with each other.

- that the final experience is almost always sub-par.

The theory is fantastic, but the practice leaves much to be desired.

I think it's both good and bad in theory and both good and bad in practice. Certainly most of the things you list are major downsides, but none of them keep the upside from being (IMO more) major.

I'm you're right that the experience is "almost always" sub-par. I would say "often", but not even "usually". I guess YMMV.

> I'm you're right that the experience is "almost always" sub-par. I would say "often", but not even "usually". I guess YMMV.

There aren't actually many fair/accurate comparisons around since most companies have either a shrink-wrapped product or a webapp. Rarely do you see both, and when there are I agree with jacquesm that the experience is almost always sub-par on the webapp [in comparison to the desktop app].

You can't really compare one company's webapp to another's non-webapp. i.e. you may feel GMail is better than Outlook, but since Google doesn't make a non-webapp version of GMail we don't know if that would be better than both Outlook and gmail.com. Microsoft does make a webapp version of Outlook, but I don't think many people find that better than "real" Outlook.

Google does in fact make a non-web version of Gmail. Gmail.app for iOS and the Android port of gmail. Both of which are a MUCH better experience them the comparable mobile web apps.

Apple's iWork suite is an example where someone is at least trying to make applications that run equally well within the browser, on mobile and on desktops.

> The theory is fantastic, but the practice leaves much to be desired

Ok... What is more fantastic for:

- large audiences?

- users who can't install/update software?

- " " can't/don't back up data?

- developers who don't have the resources to target multiple devices/platforms?

- integrations with other applications?

What's fantastic is your use of " on the Internet. First time I've seen that.

You mean you saw something new today? Now that's fantastic!

But in practice it is much better than any alternative multi-platform instant software installation ecosystem. And in practice, it has led to a thriving ecosystem of applications, most of which can link to each other and will work on a large portion of users' devices.

Yes, absolutely true. But I can't help thinking that there must be a better way to achieve these goals than this mess we've made.

We're clearly in 'we should be amazed the pig dances at all' territory rather than in 'look how good the pig can dance'.

There are no other dancers; there are only pigs.

The better way would have been for the open source community to advance the Linux desktop in the way that OSX has been evolved - i.e. To gradually bring the advantages of the web back to the OS.

But if OSX has evolved that way... Why not just use OSX?

Giving data to third parties is a side effect of networked applications, not web apps specifically. Whether the client is in a browser or a stand-alone native app, if you give it data, it will pass that data back to the application servers.

that the final experience is almost always sub-par.

I have a Gmail account and a work one that is on Thunderbird. Gmail's through the web is just overall better than Thunderbird and I usually get people to send work stuff to my Gmail account.

I hear these comments about giving precious data to third parties all the time.

But I don't hear many people talk about trying to improve it like some others are doing with remotestorage.io and byoFS or Mylar.

Indeed and I don't understand why many other developers poo poo web applications vs native.

For example we have a web app that syncs audio on any device running safari or chrome. When we demo/ turn a crowd and their devices into a stereo..we just ask them to go to X URL.

They load it up in their device and the host hits play. The audience is not forced to download an app and do a few other steps. It's just load URL and bam everyone's devices become a stereo. Many other ideas in this space can occur.

The web and what you can do it with current day isn't as hobbled as many think!

> For example we have a web app that syncs audio on any device running safari or chrome.

That's not a web-app thats a 'safari or chrome' app.

This is more or less a perfect illustration of the the issue at hand here.

The other way this illustrates a massive problem is the idea that we are supposed to be impressed by this functionality.

I'm not speaking specifically of the functionality that the grandparent poster used in his example, but just the general idea, for example: "Look at this classic console emulator, running in a webpage! (At 80% of the speed it would have run on a circa-1990s 90 mhz Pentium if it were a a native app!)"

To be clear, it is impressive when people create such things given the constraints, but (even ignoring the fragile compatibility problem between different browsers) when the platform you are using makes doing something that was impressive almost 20 years ago impressive (again) today, I'm not sure that's something we should all be that proud of as an industry.

What's the distinction? It also runs in Firefox yet the audio is out of sync (as of now). IE doesn't support the necessary tech needed.. Not yet at least.

Also the majority of mobile web users use safari and chrome anyway. Those two browsers to me are the mobile web.

Well, for starters, web applications without internet connectivity are, at best, an inferior experience. Secondly, web applications are inferior in terms of both user experience and performance in all but the most trivial applications. Thirdly, developing for the web is actually at least as much of a pain, if not more so, than supporting native code bases for multiple platforms. The difference is that webdevs have shifted that fragmentation from the native SDKs and APIs into the webdev versions of the same thing (JS frameworks, browser support, etc.).

Because the experience is not as good.

It's not as fast or as smooth or as fluid as a native experience.

It comes close, but there is a always a slight, yet perceptible lag.

In addition, each platform has specific strengths - and the LCD of web-enabled means that they can't be used.

>The audience is not forced to download an app and do a few other steps. It's just load URL and bam everyone's devices become a stereo. Many other ideas in this space can occur.

The same thing could happen with any sandboxed platform that allows code download from an internet resource -- even Java did it more than a decade ago (WebStart I think it was called).

For some reason (traction I guess) we did it through piling up of more and more BS into the web model (meant for documents), and leading into the current mess.

I mean, instead of the big guys (W3C style) getting together and creating a cross-platform sandboxed platform for native style apps (e.g with actual rich GUI widgets instead of just text entry boxes and text-boxes).

The irony is that each of the big guys developed a kind of its own half-arsed version of that, e.g Microsoft and XAML, QT and it's XML/JS thing, Adobe and Flex, etc etc.

Cross platform GUI widgets were possibly a good idea seven years ago if you didn't care about looking too good on OS X (still today, Qt applications look somewhat off on that platform). Today, they are a terrible idea, because every mobile platform looks different and if you try to make one interface for all, it will feel non-native on every one. At least if you use completely custom widgets, as HTML forces you to, it will be clearly non-native, not something pretending to be native but with the wrong behaviors.

I'm sure many people fundamentally want programming to be as close to write-once-run-anywhere as possible, and hence think this is a terrible state of affairs; for me, though, having different platforms with different, clear design philosophies is a good thing as it encourages people to care about and innovate in design.

So, which browser has a perfect sandbox for everything it does? I like the sound of it. I wonder why they don't employ those same skills to secure other software.

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