Programming

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.

What "mere users" wanted used to be the prime directive for software development. Now it's whatever scheme the marketing team comes up with.

Am programmer. Hate it.

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.

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.

I get all the advantages (portability and distribution mainly) but I also think we did the transition to web in the worst possible way. We basically took all the shitty solutions that were there 20 years ago and started improving them gradually at the same time as we moved everything to web. The result is that web apps are security and privacy nightmare.

What I think should have happened is that some standardized execution environment should have been defined that would use HTML/CSS for rendering but would also apply strict security. I would base it on web assembly, not javascript. You would be able to embedded this environment in a browser or install it at OS level. It would download an app package from a domain and by default only allow network communication with that domain. Everything else would have to be approved by the user. Basically something like web based android apps but stricter or Electron but lighter and distributed over the web. Instead of doing that we've spend 20 years perfecting lazy loading of JS scripts so that each website can have 400 trackers. And yes, I know we can do it now with Tauri but it's not very common.

Worse features with worse accessibility, reliability and horrible efficiency.

Surprise, a Document Object Model is not ideal for building User Interfaces.

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 ;)

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.

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.

It’s cloud services, not things being web based. It’s capitalism hijacking technology and preventing you from owning anything. Figma runs in the browser and it’s a fantastic piece of software. But it’s also a cloud service that can be taken away from you at any point. But if you subtract the business model, the fact that you can run something like that in the browser is incredible. Web makes it so incredibly easy to distribute cross platform software. FOSS should embrace it and use it to build actually good software not all this SASS garbage.

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.

On a PC, I prefer having local tools; mainly open-source ones. They work without network connectivity, will continue to work in the future, store my data where I have control of it, and don't generally don't spy on me.

I think web apps might make more sense on mobile devices, because I mostly use them for communications and accessing online services, so network connectivity is usually a given. Web apps could also help mitigate the spyware problem brought by mainstream installed apps, because I could block third-party scripts if they were web apps. In practice, though? I de-googled my phone and use open-source apps exclusively, for the best of both worlds.

I agree with you. Better responsivity, better UI, better privacy, keep your data collected in one place which is your computer's hard drive.

I generally prefer native local applications wherever possible, and for a long time I was against the movement to web based tools. That is until one thing changed. I moved to a different department at work. In this different department, I am issued with a Windows 11 laptop that is extremely locked down. It cannot run any executables aside from those whitelisted. I cannot run anything as administrator. If I need anything new whitelisted, I need to write a full page justification, get an endorsement from my manager, and then it can take over a year to get approved (but most likely will be immediately denied).

Obviously one thing it can run is MS Edge. All of the company tools and systems are webapps on the intranet, accessed via Edge. Now I'm grateful there are so many high quality browser based webapps around.

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.

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.

It's better than everything being exclusive to Windows, but I'd much rather everything just ran natively on Linux...

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.

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.

I like the attention to sandboxing/security that web apps are given, the ease of updating, and that the UI design is easier/more accessible (many more web devs than anything else) than traditional apps, but I still prefer the speed, size and light (memory) weight of native apps.