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by vojta_letal 2362 days ago
Most of the issues outlined are problems of the web. The HTML+CSS+JS combo is just painfully slow and wasteful by design - it's just way too many levels of flexible abstractions. Which is suboptimal for app development. Moreover it's expensive to maintain two apps - web and native - which share have the exact same UI/UX. Hence the rise of Electron, React Native , ...

The only way out of this is to rethink the web. Which is a hard one to tackle.
2 comments
mikro2nd 2362 days ago
I think it's a desktop problem, too. TBH I don't know how things are over in the Mac/Win world, but over here in Linux land it's... not so good.

Boot used to be a small number of seconds. Now (on the rare occasions I'm forced to actually boot/reboot) I start the machine and bugger off to make coffee while it does its thing. I don't know what takes so fucking long, but it's in the range of 'several minutes'.

Starting apps likewise. I just started up an infrequently used picture-editing app a little while ago,... up towards a full minute of 'loading this crap', 'loading this other crap', etc.

And let's not mention Atom (an Electron app unless I've misunderstood something) -- so laggy for some things that should be near-instant that I'm developing an active hate.

Alright: get the hell off my lawn now!

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neop1x 2362 days ago
...but it works everywhere (Win/Linux/Mac/Phones/Tablets/Consoles/Cars), no need to fight with incompatible shared dynamic libraries or ask users to install 20 native library dependencies. And the webapp is developed waaaay faster with waaay less work and money.

I also see the problem. I hate bloated websites. I hate all those little unnecessary fancy CSS animations, I use uMatrix and regularly have to figure out which of those blahblahcdn.com domains (subdomains are whitelisted) needs to be enabled to make it work.

But even those webapps can be made to be "fast enough". Developers just have to be very careful on the design from the beginning and try to use as little deppndencies as possible. Prefer simplicity and speed over fancy effects and unnecessary features no one asked for.

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