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by otakucode 3203 days ago
Well there's also some other factors I would think... as soon as you want that fancy web app of yours to convert a 10GB video file you're going to be sad. Or if you want to have control of your data. Or if you don't want someone ELSE to have control of your data. Or if you don't want them listening to everything you say, profiling everything you do, and lacing everything with advertising... Much is done remotely which has absolutely no need to be. Voice recognition is the perfect example now. Sure you need a gigantic corpus and a datacenter full of GPUs to train the recognizer... but once its trained, you could use it on a raspberry pi without a problem. But the company wouldn't get the data that way.

There's no reason a similar system couldn't be built to deliver platform-native applications that run with full access to data you control and which call out to corporate servers only for situations where those corporations are going to provide actual VALUE that couldn't be had locally couldn't be made. It just hasn't been.

1 comments

>There's no reason a similar system couldn't be built to deliver platform-native applications

I'm very into the idea of HTML/CSS/JS on the desktop (and by extension, things like react native), even if simply as a frontend to a heavier duty application running on localhost. I feel like the OSs should be shipping runtimes for it instead of having insane 120MB hello world electron apps.

Web apps also don't necessarily mean someone else has control over your data -- it is technically easier to determine whether they do. You can inspect web requests in your browser, you can't in most native apps. There are plenty of silly things like Dark Souls stat calculators that make so much more sense as a webapp, and are 100% client side.

> I'm very into the idea of HTML/CSS/JS on the desktop

Why? there are better languages, platforms and layout engines. HTML/CSS/JS was meant to be a document markup sharing platform, not a rich application one. Use the best tool for the job.

Graphical frameworks -- GTK? QT?

These are intertwined with the language and GTK especially does not look attractive on macOS and Windows.

The appeal to HTML/CSS/JS is it's 100% agnostic to the platform, and can even be used as a front-end to a program written in a different language.

Sure, but Java made that claim as a platform in 1995, and it was free and open source.
> I feel like the OSs should be shipping runtimes for it

Well, Windows does come with the MSHTML control. Sadly for some reason they decided to version lock it at IE6 instead of keeping it up to date for applications to use.

Windows 8+ added the HTML/JS native application stack in the WinRT/UWP modern application world. That stack is a lot nicer to work within than bad old days trying to script MSHTML to do what you need, if you give it the chance.
You can do that already. It's windows only though.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj891058.aspx