| > I was recently thinking that operating systems should ditch their custom desktops in favor of a browser based UI. Here's the really funny thing though, if you just think about it for a second: Whether browsers become as powerful as operating systems, or operating systems become as convenient (for users and developers) as browsers, The end result will be exactly the same. Yep. Consider how we use browsers vs. native apps right now: - I can open a browser and say type twitter.com and get the exact same experience on ANY device, right away, along with all my data. This is good. or - IF a native app is available, I have to download it first, and then, I just have to launch that app directly every time I want to use it. I get a far more responsive UI, better integration into the rest of the operating system, and the native app can support more offline capability than it could if it was running in a browser. This is good too. Now obviously what browsers are missing is the UI responsiveness, efficient hardware performance, and OS integration. What native apps are missing is the convenience of typing in a web address, and they're more difficult for developers to provide the same experience on every OS. Where we stand right now, it will take WAY more work to get web apps on the same level as native apps. Lots of wheels to reinvent. It will take far less work to make the discoverability and acquisition of native apps as convenient as typing in a web address. So why not work towards that instead? |
> It will take far less work to make the discoverability and acquisition of native apps as convenient as typing in a web address.
I don't see that as the case at all. The UI libraries are just the tip of the iceberg.
In fact, I think CSS is better suited to hardware acceleration with modern GPUs than these native libraries, which date back to the '90s, are. That's because they're declarative instead of based on imperative systems like GDI that were designed for rendering on old CPUs.