I migrated to the mobile app after discovering the site. I find the app greatly increases the readability of the site by adding just a few more colors, some icons for particularly popular threads, and a palatable dark mode.
> Think of it like this: If Hacker News required a fat client to function on your desktop, would you actually be here at all?
HN essentially is a service that provides only a couple of text views to list and read submittions and their discussions, and requires zero processing or interaction. That's hardly a challenging problem that requires a fat client.
If however we were discussing an application that required significant data processing, access to your personal data, or even access to photo ir video input... You'd hardly be able to implement something with HTML+CSS.
Case in point: twitter is very usable as a website but instagram is not.
What functionality are you referring to? The only one I can think of is photo editing. It’s not that difficult to make a photo editor in the browser. The only problem is performance. It would’ve been harder when Instagram was originally launched.
Instagram is perfectly usable as a website, at least on an iPhone. I guess some features might be missing, but the core stuff is there: browsing, adding photo, filters, stories.
Add a file input -> the users taps it -> ios asks if they want to use an existing photo or take a new one -> take a new photo. Result on android may differ.
> That's hardly a challenging problem that requires a fat client.
That's irrelevant. It doesn't matter that making a fat client for HN isn't necessary; that's completely beside the point. You're looking for reasons to ignore the stated premise of an analogy rather than accepting that the premise would be true.
It's like this. Say you were beginning to explain how network services work with an anecdote: "Say you need to go to the market to get a carton of milk." Suddenly your listener stops you and says, "But I don't like milk."
If your response to the above paragraph is, "But I don't know how network services work," then, congratulations, you can look forward to an exciting career in either comedy or politics, depending on whether or not you were serious.
Can you please not post flamewar-style comments to HN, regardless of how wrong or provocative you find another comment? We're trying for better than this here.
Given that all websites are running code on your device, that seems like a distinction with a very small difference. The question is what has the better sandbox to protect yourself. The web is definitely better but somehow I still get tracked across sites and shown "relevant" ads. Mobile apps are also fairly well sandboxed and yet some apps that need your permission to do something useful also use that permission to do evil.
As web applications get more powerful, they will become a greater and greater source of the issues that currently plague mobile apps.
Most mobile apps are really just glorified websites that don't need anything above and beyond the web sandbox. But they're going to ask for those permissions anyway, because when an app is the only way to use a sufficiently popular service, people will grant them.
It is much easier when being nice is enforced by a third party - in other words, the webpage might have an interest in taking all your cycles, but the browser app has an interest in the opposite (battery life and whatnot). So far, this seems to work well - for all the gripes of FB Messenger taking all the CPU and requiring every permission in the known universe, the FB mobile web gets adequately sandboxed by the browser.
(I am aware that the Android app model has also promised some sandboxing, but apparently even in a low-permission mode, the protection seems to be rather anemic)
On the web I can install ublock origin, privacybadger, and a vpn. Even if you ignore the phone's personal data aspect that's a 99% improvement over mobile.
Yes, drastically. Wikipedia and Hacker News don't have access to the contents of my phone or desktop, just as they don't have access to the contents of my home or mailbox.
Think of it like this: If Hacker News required a fat client to function on your desktop, would you actually be here at all?