[geezerjay]

> 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.

[notSupplied]

On mobile, you don't use a fat client for HN? I've even paid money for an app (MiniHack) to have a nicer experience on mobile.

[geezerjay]

Truth be told, a full blown mobile app isn't needed to tweak the UI or provide different views.

[code_duck]

They wouldn’t have to change much about Instagram to make it into Twitter.

[geezerjay]

If you take away those features then you cease to have instagram.

Instagram users only use instagram because it provides access to those functionalities.

[code_duck]

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.

[bgarbiak]

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.

[sosborn]

How do you post a photo on instagram in a web browser? I thought that was reserved for the app.

[payamb]

You can post a photo on instagram in a browser on iphone. you also can on other platforms by changing your useragent to webkit

[syrrim]

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.

[sosborn]

Interesting, they don’t seem to allow this on the desktop browser. Changing the user-agent yo a mobile browser exposes it. What a strange decision.

[laurentl]

I don’t use Instagram so can’t check the code, but I would guess they use something like

    <input type="file" accept="image/*" capture>

Which does what you’d expect on a mobile device (launch the camera) but behaves differently on desktops (opens a file upload dialog). They may have decided that this behavior would confuse users.

[geezerjay]

How do you ensure that a client only sees a picture/video once and can't save it?

[code_duck]

The photos are available as publicly accessible jpgs through http. They’re not really trying to do that.

[cschep]

You can't ensure this natively either.

[da_chicken]

> 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.

[dang]

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html