[mvnuweucxqokii]

There is a very clear market desire for desktop style apps delivered through browsers.

Users love it. Users hate installers. Users hate updates. Webpages have neither.

Companies love it. Makes subscription access apps easy to sell. Makes it easy to target all platforms and keep costs low.

Seems very flippant to completely dismiss the dominant trend in this industry over the past 20 years as simply wrong.

I agree the technologies are not well suited to this purpose which is why I avoid frontend at all costs. But powerful web apps generate a lot of value for a lot of people, myself included.

[eschaton]

Nah. This “dominant trend” exists because companies are always trying to get developers as cheaply as possible, not because pretending web pages are applications actually provides real productivity or usability or even deployment benefits over the long term relative to native applications.

Some of us have been in this industry long enough to see the same promises come around several times in various forms and they’ve always been bullshit. Thats why I don’t participate in it and stick to native development.

[timw4mail]

I disagree. Most of the "interactivity" is attention-stealing anti-patterns that no sane person actually wants.

News sites with scrolling auto-playing videos, overly-complex SPAs that are slow when you just want to get this specific task done, newsletter subscription modals, the list goes on.

True "webapps" are rarer than we've been lead to believe.