What’s your guys general thought on how everything is web based now? For me, I don’t really like it. I would just rather have an actual program that runs. But I am merely a user, not a programmer.
I hate it. It’s useful for enterprise systems, since the people using that often need to access it from any device. Image/video/sound editing? Let me have an installed program and DON’T MAKE IT FUCKING ELECTRON. Most of the things I use don’t connect to the internet, so I’d have to self host anyway, so I’d rather have the full application rather than run a localhost server.
As someone who 3D prints as a hobby, I prefer Chitubox over Lychee because the latter is an electron app, plus they force a 30 second ad wait when you click “slice”.
For a lot of things I would rather have something web based than app based. I hate having to download some random app from some random company just to interact with something one time. Why do all restaurants, car parking places etc require apps rather than just having a simple site. Not everything should be native first IMO.
Yeah there are pros and cons. Desktop apps are not sandboxed. Mobile apps are often missing features and are annoying to install. Websites often have poor performance or janky UX on mobile, and you need to be online, and you don’t have control of their availability.
I think the best option depends on what the thing is - ordering food from a random pub? Web site. Video editing? App.
I should clarify i meant this more for computing rather than mobile. I do not like mobile half assed apps.
I understand the convenience, but I don’t like it. All my data is on someone else’s computer, and I have to enable activity trackers for the privilege of accessing my data? Heck nah.
If the major OSs could treat a web browser instance like a separate app, I wouldn’t hate it so much. Like I want a dedicated thing on my taskbar/dock that will always take me to my google calendar. I hate having to search through browser windows (even when named) to find the right one.
I use a seperate browser for aws console to make it quicker to find.
But I do love being able to have more than one tab per app (like for aws console) which most standalone apps don’t support.
For splitting the app in the taskbar I found it useful to “install” the PWA (you got to find the hidden option in chrome for that…), if it’s supported by the website… It still uses the same cookies and addons, but at least it doesn’t easily get merged with the main browser window and behaves like a proper desktop application. I mainly use firefox though and it doesn’t support PWAs (easily, at least). It’s a shame it’s not more common, because it’s a much better way to run software than the many electron apps, each having their own chromium installation (no download, no long installation process, full sandboxing, and you can have addons & adblockers affect the pwa!)
you can create shortcuts of web addresses and it’ll open that address in your default browser
Yeah, but finding it the second time is the problem. For most things I want to get back to the part of the app I was on. Google cal is simple, so doesn’t have that issue. But aws console would. And most other apps too.
As a dev: for all their flaws, web apps are easier to distribute, portable, and have a lot of support in frameworks. They also require little infrastructure in most cases.
As a user: web apps run without installing anything, are mostly portable between my browsers of choice, and run in a sandbox to protect my computer.
Probably 90% of my needs can be served by a web app if it is well designed. If I can’t have a web app, I will look for a flatpak version and failing that I will look for it in my distro.
I used to be like this too. I thought it would be too mainstream to have a website rather than a natively compiled application running on the computer…
And then my friend in high school started this thing on his laptop… a website… it was server side rendered… pretty satisfying… Then it took off…
I think the web can be nice with the right mix. I’m personally not too fan of these pages that are just white if you don’t turn on JavaScript. It’s just a feeling, nothing special. From a business perspective it makes sense, to throw all the rendering to the devices to save cost.
From a business perspective it makes sense, to throw all the rendering to the devices to save cost.
Not just to save cost. It’s basically OS-agnostic from the user’s point of view. The web app works fine in desktop Linux, MacOS, or Windows. In other words, when I’m on Linux I can have a solid user experience on apps that were designed by people who have never thought about Linux in their life.
Meanwhile, porting native programs between OSes often means someone’s gotta maintain the libraries that call the right desktop/windowing APIs and behavior between each version of Windows, MacOS, and the windowing systems of Linux, not all of which always work in expected or consistent ways.
What “mere users” wanted used to be the prime directive for software development. Now it’s whatever scheme the marketing team comes up with.
People don’t like downloading things unless they absolutely have to. It immediately puts a weight against anyone using what you’ve created. With web based, there’s nothing to download, and it works on any platform that can run a browser.
While at the same time, this is just a ‘perception’ thing.
The user is always downloading all the JS, just not really keeping it in a place they would look at and not having to click a “Download” button.cheap interpretation. clearly the commenter meant download and install apps vs just visiting a website.
Worse features with worse accessibility, reliability and horrible efficiency.
Surprise, a Document Object Model is not ideal for building User Interfaces.
A bit too broad to give a specific answer from my side.
Overall, I prefer web based over apps, because I can CSS hack and if necessary JS hack them.
Web also means it doesn’t litter my PC or mobile phone or tablet. And that it can’t fetch more data than it needs or I want it to have access to.
Bad software is bad software, no matter if it’s installed or on the web.
If you can achieve the desired UX on web, I see few reasons to build a native app. But of course it can be hard to work with web technology sometimes; Javascript and WASM can’t do everything and they aren’t the best developer experience compared to more moderns languages.
Even for offline usage, there is increasing support for progressive web apps. For example, I don’t even need to be connected to the internet to use Exaclidraw after I’ve loaded the app once and installed it as a PWA.
Then there are times when you simply need access to native platform APIs. SQLite is a a very important technology that isn’t easily used from a web app. Most of the powerful APIs you get from an OS like the file system or graphics APIs are extremely watered down for the web.
Am programmer. Hate it.
HTML/CSS/JS is just a possible frontend technology. It doesn’t really matter if your frontend is written in that or written in Qt or whatever. What matters in the end is that the developers are good ones. If the developers suck, the frontend will suck.
There aren’t many good developers.
It’s terribad, the only glimmer of hope is web assembly and the related apis, but ultimately it’s just adding another layer to the onion that will eventually have sensitive data and important interfaces to protect and require yet another layer on top.
Also it’s a sneaky way of exploiting foss without contributing back.
There are a couple of functions that web apps almost always have and that native apps tend to lack: (1) selecting and copying text from anywhere in the app to the clipboard; (2) bookmarking individual views within the app. Of course, natives apps in principle could be faster and use more of your hardware —in practice though, they tend to be horribly bloated electron crapps. 😅 So yeah, a decent native app can be better than a web app, but good luck finding one for your purpose.
natives apps in principle could be faster and use more of your hardware —in practice though, they tend to be horribly bloated electron crapps.
Electron “apps” are just glorified web pages anyhow. Native applications do offer superior performance as they are AOT compiled code. The ones that are written in rust, c, c++ etc, and if they are gui applications use frameworks like QT or GTK+. They are called native since they are compiled to machine code and are directly executable in the cpu without any kind of runtime like electron browser, java or python.
