[eggdaft]

I agree you’re right in that the current tech stack is bad. But the answer is to fix that, and I think (very) slowly we will.

JS was a terrible language but nowadays it is pretty good in some areas, passable in others, with some horror shows left in. The ecosystem and tooling are the real problems. I don’t understand why these issues haven’t been addressed by Google et al.

Native applications are just so much more expensive to develop and maintain. Given the nuances of different platforms, it’s also very difficult to keep different versions in sync. People expect collaboration as table stakes, which makes that task even harder.

I agree accessibility is a problem.

Ironically the Java applet had the right idea, as a compromise between our positions, but wrong time and maybe wrong language? Its Swiss cheese security didn’t help either.

[account42]

> Native applications are just so much more expensive to develop and maintain.

Quality isn't free, yes.

> Given the nuances of different platforms, it’s also very difficult to keep different versions in sync.

Don't tightly couple applications and backend service versions (where a backend is even needed, otherwise make it all local) and this is not a problem. You should be using open (relatively stable) protocols wherever possible anyway.

Web apps "solve" platform differences by completely disregarding them and expecting users to adapt to the application instead. This does not make them better.

[ho_schi]

Yep.

Quality isn’t free and native applications provide quality (reliance, performance, integration, usability).

The platform issues just moved to WebKit, Blink and Gecko. New platform issues and the web developers complain like application developers ;)

Companies favor the web usually to lower their own cost, give them control over users and being free of rules. Users pay for it. With higher hardware requirements (Electron), loss of data, loss of control and the absence of usability. And as states above, a website shall not stress my CPU or RAM.

The worst example is Microsoft Teams. The best example is your preferred Matrix client application.