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0 pointsklabb33y ago0 comments

> BINGO. At times, it seems everyone is talking through each other because we are thinking of different things

Glad to hear. Yes, it seems like the post and the comments are largely missing the functional issue at play.

> the blog post we are talking about which displays awful without running JavaScript

Yeah, case in point, perhaps.. I mean if you have two paths (incremental and full) to reach the same state, you better be careful to ensure those are functionally equivalent. This is surface are for bugs, so the very least you need to do is turn off JS and test all flows. To me, the value add of SPAs is the snappy UI, and offline-capabilities, so if you’re gonna roundtrip to the server anyway, then you may as well just re-render the entire page old-school to greatly reduce complexity.

> the biggest problem I have with these is that they exist as web clients in the first place: the world would be a different place if approaches such as wxWidgets has paid off and gotten adopted, imagine how many slow and bloated web apps could've been beautiful and fast native applications.

I actually disagree with this (the opinion, not the problem statement). The main players, Apple, Microsoft, Google, have known about the cross-platform issues and haven’t done jack in decades (perhaps flutter deserves an honorary mention though). Meanwhile, the web, with all its problems, have gotten so much better. Getting the web to the point of native standards seems much more feasible than establishing new open standards for app development. The bloat issue is largely a red herring imo. A well made web app is snappy, and importantly, can be sandboxed. The issue is that people don’t care. You can find equally shitty and bloated apps in the sea of crap on the app stores. With webview support in the OS, bundles can be small. I have an app based on Tauri which is web based, and the msi is 10Mb. It’s never had any perf issues.

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doodlesdev3y ago· 1 in thread

   > I have an app based on Tauri which is web based, and the msi is 10Mb. It’s never had any perf issues.

And that's on the heavy side! Tauri is awesome, it's unfortunate most developers opt for Electron to reduce the amount of testing needed between browser engines.

I agree with you that a well-made web app is snappy and works well. I don't think we'll go back to native apps (for now), what I hope for is simply that it could become an _option_ as right now it's just basically trying to swim upstream.

Web apps do a lot of things really well that native applications always had difficulty with, such as accessibility and distribution. Still, I feel that even when doing web apps that are snappy they miss out on some cool features of native applications such as consistent theming, reduced memory usage, reduced CPU usage (regardless of how well the web app is written), and just the simplicity of it.

Perhaps the ship has already sailed, and native applications will never make a comeback, in which case I hope lighter weight engines purpose-made for web applications get adopted as an alternative to shipping the entirety of Chromium with each program I download. Projects like Servo [0] show me that's possible, it's just that there is currently no interest from the big players to keep funding these developments and provide them as an alternative to Chromium.

[0]: https://servo.org/

klabb3OP3y ago

> And that's on the heavy side! Tauri is awesome, it's unfortunate most developers opt for Electron to reduce the amount of testing needed between browser engines.

The browser engine differences isn’t that big of a deal, because you already have standard ways of dealing with it on the web. I think today the main reasons people pick Electron today are tooling, desktop integration features and Node. Tauri is catching up insanely fast though. I am very happy that I jumped on the bandwagon fairly early.

> in which case I hope lighter weight engines purpose-made for web applications get adopted as an alternative to shipping the entirety of Chromium with each program I download

Absolutely, shipping a browser engine is insanity and should always have been a stopgap at best imo. Even servo is way too heavyweight to ship with each app. Good news is with OS having native webviews we’re 80-95% there already, so we don’t even have to deal with that tradeoff – this let’s an app have a perf overhead of ~1 typical browser tab. It’ll take a moment to iron out all kinks but it’s already perfectly acceptable on most deployment targets. Honestly, Linux is just as bad when it comes to distribution. Distros have been in some perpetual siloing mindset and have not been able to get behind a decent and unified distribution story. It has nothing to do with web though.

> it's just that there is currently no interest from the big players to keep funding these developments

The big players have been so awful that even if you disregard the abysmal interop story, distributing native apps is still orders of magnitude more hassle than the web ecosystem. Imo Electron was born as an escape hatch from that disaster, not because frontend developers conspired to eat all the worlds RAM for fun. I absolutely agree that the big players should passively fund projects like servo and tauri. I don’t want them anywhere near strategic decision making though.

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