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by toyg 3860 days ago
> maybe the cross-platform nature of HTML/CSS/JS will also be vital to future applications.

There are already cross-platform toolkits that can deliver everything a browser engine can, faster and safely.

Face it, "web technologies" are not winning because of any massive technological advancement, just like C++ wasn't this huge advancement over C. They just managed to achieve enough critical mass to make everything else look less popular. In the '90s, OOP did that through academia and commercial push (in what was a much smaller tech sector); html/css/js did it through the accidental monopoly that is the web browser. The end result is basically the same.
1 comments
ZenoArrow 3860 days ago
> "There are already cross-platform toolkits that can deliver everything a browser engine can, faster and safely."

Nothing with the reach of web technologies. The closest I can think of is Qt, but there are issues with deploying Qt apps on some platforms.

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creshal 3860 days ago
So our choices are

• Native applications that give users excellent UX and performance

• Web apps that are equally quirky and slow on every system

?

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ZenoArrow 3860 days ago
As with all design decisions, it's a trade off. The main benefit of web apps is found in their cross-platform nature. If this is desirable then you may choose to sacrifice a little performance to get that.

To give an analogy, it's like programming languages. It's possible to write very fast code with assembly languages, yet their portability to other architectures is practically non-existent. Part of the reason higher level languages like C/C++ are used is because they are much more portable.

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