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 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.
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.
disk access is missing in web apps. browsers have built in dbs available for devs to use
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.
When possible, I prefer all of my tools to be in terminal. I’m not particularly interested in graphical user interfaces, or using my mouse at all. My only real exception is if I am doing digital art, but otherwise I look for either a terminal version of the app I’m looking for, a TUI, or I make a small terminal based app that utilizes the api of the service I am trying to access.
This.
It’s a choice.
I almost never use web apps; I do only when what I’m doing is fundamentally a web interaction: banking, for instance. Everything’s on their servers anyway.
For everything else, I (too) use shell applications. Even if I didn’t, there are tons of native GUI applications to choose from, and they are often far better experiences than SPAs or Electron apps: just look at the memory and CPU use, if you want a baseline metric.
Why do people do this? Because they fancy that they’re providing a good enough interface that works on every OS. Which is often not the case, and by the time you invest enough effort to get your SPA working well on every possible platform you could have written native apps that look and function better; and most organizations still throw in the towel and add a caveat “works best in X”, giving lie to the “web apps work everywhere.” So: laziness, or being cheap, and not really carrying about the user experience: those are the reasons people write web apps.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Personally I really don’t like it too. But I just don’t care because:
- I have all needed software locally
- I have all documentation locally
- I’m going to Web only to get updates (by-hands of course, no autoupdates without verification!)
- I’m old software engineer and how to automate it all without losing ctrl ;)
What “mere users” wanted used to be the prime directive for software development. Now it’s whatever scheme the marketing team comes up with.
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.
I should clarify i meant this more for computing rather than mobile. I do not like mobile half assed apps.
I agree that it can suck.
Many webapps are frustrating as all hell.
But I would rather one webapp with effort behind it than several shoddily implemented and pooroy maintained applications for various platforms.
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.
It’s better than everything being exclusive to Windows, but I’d much rather everything just ran natively on Linux…
Am programmer. Hate it.
I agree with you. Better responsivity, better UI, better privacy, keep your data collected in one place which is your computer’s hard drive.
