[zagrebian]

> web technologies for UI … slow, and heavy

It’s not the web platform features that are slow and heavy. It’s all the JavaScript on top of it. You can make a UI on the web with just HTML and a bit of CSS. Nothing beats that in terms of performance and small size*. But if you add several MBs of JavaScript frameworks on top of that, then it becomes what you described.

*Try the HTML version of Gmail in your browser https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/. Just HTML and CSS. It’s the fastest email client in the world.

edit: I timed it. HTML Gmail loads and fully renders in about 1 second.

[criddell]

> Nothing beats that in terms of performance and small size

Native controls do. For example, Steve Gibson wrote a DNS benchmarking utility[1] and the executable is 159k. No matter what you do, an HTML & CSS is still being rendered by a slow interpreter.

BTW, when I clicked on that link for HTML GMail, Google made me click through a warning trying to scare me off. I'm not sure why they would care if I use the HTML version.

In the end, I don't think the speed of CSS + HTML controls matters much. It's limiting and not a great choice for an operating system UI toolkit.

[1]: https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

[zagrebian]

I don’t understand why you’re mentioning a DNS utility.

[criddell]

You couldn't write a web-based version that was anywhere near as fast and small. A browser sitting there showing a blank page is bigger.

[isaacaggrey]

> Try the HTML version of Gmail in your browser https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/. Just HTML and CSS. It’s the fastest email client in the world.

I use Fastmail on a regular basis and it's snappier than the HTML version of Gmail.

[zagrebian]

How long does it take to load and fully render HTML Gmail on your device? For me, it’s 1.15 seconds, and that’s from the moment I click the above link to the moment rendering is complete.