[schmichael]

> if we want JS applications on the web to continue to be viable alternatives to native applications on each platform

This is where I disagree with the direction Mozilla has been going for years. I don't want the web to be a desktop app replacement with HTTP as the delivery mechanism. I'm fine with rich single page web apps, but I don't understand the reason why web apps need complete feature parity with desktop apps.

Why not let the web be good at some things and native apps be good at others?

[dherman]

I don't know if there's a uniform Mozilla position on this, but here's mine! :) The main reason I care about the Web is because it's the world's biggest software platform that isn't owned. If someone can deliver their app to the world without submitting it for review by an app store and without paying a company a %-age of the revenue, and if they can market it through the viral power of URLs, then they have a lot more control over their own destiny. That's why I think it's important for the Web not to give up on hard but solvable problems.

But also I think there's a false dichotomy between "the Web should just be for documents" and "the Web should just be for apps." The Web is simultaneously an application platform that blows all other platforms out of the water for delivering content. First, there's a reason why so many native apps embed WebViews -- despite its warts, CSS is the result of hundreds of person-years of tuning for deploying portable textual content.

But more importantly, you just can't beat the URL. How many more times will we convince the entirety of humanity to know how to visually parse "www.zombo.com" on a billboard or in a text message? It's easy to take the Web for granted, it's fun to snark about its warts, and there's a cottage industry of premature declarations of its death. But I personally believe that the humble little hyperlink is at the heart of the Web's power, competitive strength, and longevity. It was a century-old dream passed on from Vannevar Bush to Doug Englebart to Xerox PARC and ultimately to TBL who made it real.

[mindcrime]

But more importantly, you just can't beat the URL. How many more times will we convince the entirety of humanity to know how to visually parse "www.zombo.com" on a billboard or in a text message? It's easy to take the Web for granted, it's fun to snark about its warts, and there's a cottage industry of premature declarations of its death. But I personally believe that the humble little hyperlink is at the heart of the Web's power, competitive strength, and longevity. It was a century-old dream passed on from Vannevar Bush to Doug Englebart to Xerox PARC and ultimately to TBL who made it real.

URLs are great, but they don't have to be limited to the web. Or, rather to say, the thing on the other end of the URL doesn't necessarily need to be something the browser handles directly.

I'd like to see something developed that lets you do something like:

    x11://myapp.example.com

where clicking on that link in a browser launches the remote app and then renders the UI locally using X11 remoting - as opposed to trying to render the application UI in the browser.

OK, I know, go ahead and say it.. X11 sucks, X11 remoting doesn't work on WAN links, etc. To which I say:

a. Fine, let's invent something better, that still avoid the need to pack every ounce of functionality in the universe, into a web browser.

and

b. That doesn't jibe with my experience anyway. Just earlier this week I was playing around and decided to launch a remote X app using X forwarding over ssh, over a public Internet link. Worked like a champ. In fact, it reminded me of how fucking awesome X11 remoting really is, and makes me long for either a resurgence of interest in it, OR (see a above) the invention of a newer, better version that everybody can be happy with.

There's also a lot to be said for delivering applications using Java Web Start as well. JWS is wicked cool technology that is tragically under-utilized. IMO, anyway. :-)

[bobajeff]

That would require plugins which are being phased out and for good reason.

Namely, because they allow something like Adobe Flash Player - which doesn't come close to supporting all the platforms the Web runs on - to become a defacto standard. Thus restricting a large portion of the Web to just a few platforms Adobe wants to support.

[mindcrime]

That's one way of looking at it. OTOH, not allowing plugins arbitrarily restricts web users to the lowest common denominator of technologies that are supported by browser vendors. Why should I care to have my technology choices dictated by browser vendors any more than I care to have them dictated by Adobe?

That said, nothing about what I'm proposing specifically requires plugins. All it would require would be for the browser vendors to work together (cough, cough, I know, cough cough) to implement a standard mechanism for doing this. Actually, it might not even take that. Browsers already have a way to setup handlers for unsupported content types and what-not, so it might be possible to build what I'm thinking about largely on top of that. Of course it would mean that if you wanted to run an "application" UI you'd have to have a suitable platform (an X server, or something like an X server) running along-side your browser. So you maybe wouldn't be able to run OpenOffice on your smart-phone. OK, personally, I can live with that. Not all devices are equivalent and there's no reason to expect every thing to work one every device.

[bobajeff]

That's true you don't actually need a browser to do what you're talking about. In fact I'm pretty sure x11 already does this.

[schmichael]

> without paying a company a %-age of the revenue

It may not be a %-age of revenue, but you definitely can't host a non-trivial webapp for free either.

You could even argue that in many webapps scaling costs are proportional to revenue, which makes it awfully similar to an app store.

> But also I think there's a false dichotomy between "the Web should just be for documents" and "the Web should just be for apps."

Yeah, I don't have a clear idea on where the web should "end", but wow... web pages able to eat all my cores and have data races seems like a line to be crossed with great caution and care.

[btown]

> web pages able to eat all my cores

We're already there:

    var code = "while(true){}";
    var Blob = window.Blob;
    var URL = window.webkitURL || window.URL;
    var bb = new Blob([code], {type : 'text/javascript'});
    code = URL.createObjectURL(bb);
    for (var i = 0; i < 8; i += 1) new Worker(code);

[pcwalton]

> Yeah, I don't have a clear idea on where the web should "end", but wow... web pages able to eat all my cores and have data races seems like a line to be crossed with great caution and care.

We crossed that line long ago (well, not precisely with data races, but with message/event ordering races...)

[dimka]

that presumes that this freedom of self marketing is based on freedom of the internet. there are many countries where internet is restricted and URLs is a part of the restriction filter.

[Klathmon]

For me, it's because "native apps" still fail at the first step, installation.

Whether it's a website, or web-app, "installing" it is as easy as going to a URL. You can go to that same URL on your PC, phone, tablet, your friend's computer, etc. and it will run the same. It's easy to share, easy to remember, and if it takes more than 5 seconds from the time you hit enter to the time you are using it, we consider that a mistake on the creators part. Plus the ability to discover new applications is extremely easy, and interoperability with other web applications is both easy for the developer and the user.

Compare that to desktop applications where installation is still an "event", and you are lucky if it can be done faster than a few minutes. Plus there are portability issues (oh that doesn't have a windows version?), it's difficult to share (try explaining how to install software to a non-technical person...), there is DRM all over the place, and they are significantly less secure.

Even most mobile applications take 30+ seconds to install on my android phone, and have all the same issues with discoverability, cross-platform issues, vendor lockin, and permissions/security issues.

[schmichael]

Support for more advanced features like WebGL, DRM, codecs, etc vary by browser and platform. Even the protocols underlying the web - HTTP and TLS - have varying levels of support that affect app developers and portability. Not to mention sharing a link between mobile devices and desktops doesn't always work very well.

Don't get me wrong: I appreciate the portability of the web. I just worry the focus on making it more native-like will introduce more of what makes the native ecosystem so frustrating.

[Klathmon]

Per the more advanced features.

The one thing that the web has that native doesn't, is a standards body that works to unify and standardize these features so they can eventually work across all platforms.

There have been hiccups in the past (probably the most notable one being the WebSQL vs IndexedDB, but luckily that's mostly sorted out now), but for the most part it's been pretty smooth sailing.

Yeah, you definitely need to wait longer to use new features that can't be "polyfilled" or "shimmed", but the "reward" is that the entire platform is at least moving in the same direction.

While I agree that native has some pretty massive upsides, I personally feel that they should be reserved for things that need them, much like how assembly is treated when compared to higher level languages. And bringing those upsides to the web in a safe and consistent manner isn't a bad thing.

[tnorthcutt]

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1367/

[macspoofing]

>I don't want the web to be a desktop app replacement

That ship has sailed a long time ago.

>I'm fine with rich single page web apps, but I don't understand the reason why web apps need complete feature parity with desktop apps.

Because ...?

[mindcrime]

Because ...?

Not the poster you're replying to, but I'll share my thoughts:

1. Trying to make the browser ideal for both browsing content, and rendering rich application UIs bloats the browser.

2. Time spent trying to make the browser a poor imitation of an X server is time that could go into making the browser better at, ya know, browsing. FSM only knows, Firefox could use a LOT more developer time spent on improving performance and reducing the memory footprint. (Yeah, I know, sometimes that those goals overlap. But not always, which is the point)

3. For all the talk about how X11 remoting doesn't work over the Internet, I've done it and it worked just fine. YMMV, but it certainly can work just fine in at least some situations.

4. Trying to create a rich experience in the browser inevitably leads to conflicts that don't exist in a desktop app. For example, typically the F1 key is the "Help" key. So if I'm sitting in a web application, and I hit F1, what happens? Do I get help for my application, or for the web browser? Likewise, can my app easily use the F11 key? No. And look at the UI inconsistency between web "apps". There's none. With desktop apps, most apps adhered (mostly) to one of a relatively small set of standards... CUA, or whatever. With web apps, the experience is all over the damn place.

I'm sure there are other good reasons, but those jump out to me.

[macspoofing]

>Trying to make the browser ideal for both browsing content, and rendering rich application UIs bloats the browser.

Maybe, maybe not - depends on how you define bloat. Modern operating systems, mobile and desktop, are magnitudes larger than their counterparts from years ago, are they bloated because they are bigger?

Having a more feature-rich browser doesn't make a browser 'bloated' - it makes it more feature-rich.

>Firefox could use a LOT more developer time spent on improving performance and reducing the memory footprint.

That's already happening, except browser performance is now focused on improving rendering engines and js engines to enable rich applications, because every modern browser is already very good at rendering 'simple', non-RIA, pages.

>For example, typically the F1 key is the "Help" key. So

Woah woah. Giving web applications capabilities that match those of native desktop applications, doesn't mean mimicking every desktop convention. The Web doesn't work with function keys, that's a convention that arose largely from platform limitations - so F1 doesn't mean 'Help' in the Web, just like F1 doesn't mean help in your CLI either. What's wrong with that?

>For all the talk about how X11 remoting doesn't work over the Internet

Anything can work - the problem is that there is no universal platform accessible to consumers to enable X11 streaming. On the other hand, almost every computing device these days provides an HTML/CSS/JS rendering engine. That's why developers want to build on top of the web-stack. So through a quirk of history that's what we ended up with - in an alternate universe, maybe the standard for rich web applications are Java Applets, or ActiveX, or X11, or SSH, or whatever. That's not the world we live in.

>With web apps, the experience is all over the damn place.

Sure, and you can go crazy, but there are conventions. For example, the way links look and behave is intuitive. I've built desktop and web applications, and there is a core 'feel' that all web-applications share because the browser takes care of so much of the behaviour and provides the base widgets and the framework. Things like the way links look, that they are underlined when you hover over them and your cursor changes, that you can right-click on a link and open in a new window/tab, how cut-and-paste and text-highlight is handled, drag-and-drop, (browser) zoom, how fullscreen works. Yes, any given page can override some of those of behaviors, but then again, so can a 'native' app.

[yoklov]

One reason might be that native app distribution platforms are getting progressively more closed, whereas the web is getting/remaining open.

[dottrap]

I might get downvoted for this, but I think it is an important point to really consider. The claim that the web is getting/remaining open is somewhat dubious. As JavaScript and web browsers get increasingly complex, it is harder for anybody to just start up and write a usable, compliant web browser from scratch, which in fact entrenches the status quo.

And why do we simply trust the existing browsers? Google has very specific goals to monetize you and Chrome can be leveraged to help that goal. Microsoft's historic fight with the web and now their current changing business goals are a reminder that their web browser goals can always change, and their current model seems more like Google. Apple is always Apple. And why should we blindly trust Mozilla? They depend on external funding to keep the foundation going to pay for a lot of the complex engineering that goes into Firefox. I'm not accusing them of anything wrong, but you can look up prior controversies about their funding sources and decisions and see people don't agree it is all rosy.

I'm suggesting the increasing technical complexity is not necessarily working towards the goal of an open web because it is entrenching the gatekeepers that can make the web browsers.

[EdSharkey]

Distribution. It's what copyrights are about. GPL and open source licenses are all concerned with terms of distribution. App stores and walled gardens are about controlling and charging rent for distribution. It's basically all about trade.

The web for software distribution is free or very near free in a lot of cases.

Your point about browser vendors monetizing their users is valid, but that is unrelated with distribution of software that targets the browser.

I choose Mozilla; I trust them the most of all of the browser vendors and I appreciate how they continue to drive so many web standards forward.

[yoklov]

I'm not sure that being able to write a competing browser is a requirement for the platform to be open. Just that anybody can write and deploy code to it.

(Full disclosure: I'm employed by Mozilla, but these opinions are entirely my own.)

[schmichael]

Closed has benefits. "Curated" is a nice euphemism for closed.

It's much easier to childproof a curated app store than The WWW for example.

I'm not saying closed is better -- they're just different and that's ok. In fact I like how different they are. It means each has its own unique strengths and doesn't have to worry about trying to do it all.

[yoklov]

IMO what you want are curated views into open platforms. Some arbiter deciding what is/isn't acceptable for the platform is very far from ideal. Consider all the great games that have been prevented from going on iOS.

Admittedly, something like this seems difficult to do for the web.

[warfangle]

So, you're pretty negative on WebGL then?

[schmichael]

Pretty meh. I'm sure there are some excellent uses of it that I encounter and enjoy without realizing it, but few of the advanced demos work for me (Chrome on Linux w/Intel gfx) or bring my computer to its knees rendering at very low FPS.

It feels like something that was more interested in competing with native than offering a constrained and portable approach.

[warfangle]

Quake 3 doesn't work for you? :)

http://media.tojicode.com/q3bsp/

[schmichael]

A low resolution static subset of a game from 1999 does seem to work in my browser... I'm not super impressed.