[klabb3]

Contrary to HN popular belief, there are neither incentives nor benefits to building native ui apps, for neither consumer nor professional apps. The exception is apps that only make sense on a single platform, such as window management and other deep integration. On iOS/macos you have a segment of indie/smaller apps that capture a niche market of powerusers for things like productivity apps. But the point is it makes no sense for anything from Slack, VSCode, Maya, DaVinci Resolve, and so on, to build native UIs. Even if they wanted to build and maintained 3 versions, advanced features aren’t always available in these frameworks. In the case of Windows, even MS has given up on their own tech, and have opted to launch webview based apps. Apple is slightly more principled.

[dagmx]

Qt delegates to native UI in a lot of cases. I think a lot of people who rail against native UI fail to delineate between native UI and first party frameworks. Using third party frameworks, even cross platform ones, does not mean you lose out on native UI elements.

[trymas]

I am not an apple framework expert, but some things in apple ecosystem are nice.

CoreImage - GPU accelerated image processing out of the box;

ML/GPU frameworks - you can get built-in, on device's GPU running ML algorithms or do computations on GPU;

Accelerate - CPU vector computations;

Doing such things probably will force you to have platform specific implementations anyway. Though as you said - makes sense only in some niches.

[NetMageSCW]

Strong disagree. I think Microsoft’s decision to wrap web apps for the desktop is one of the stupidest they have ever made. It provides poor user experience, uses more battery power and needs more memory and CPU to be performant and creates inconsistencies and wierd errors compared to native apps.

[cosmic_cheese]

The increased adoption of webviews has resulted in a death by a thousand cuts effect on Windows 11 performance. The speed bump that comes from going from an up to date Windows 11 install to a up to date Windows 10 install on the same machine is stunning… W10 is much more snappy in every regard despite being nearly identical functionally speaking.

I won’t try to claim that Electron and friends have no place is software development but we absolutely should be pushing back harder against stuffing it everywhere it possibly can be.

[bigyabai]

> but we absolutely should be pushing back

Every modern desktop uses webviews in some capacity. macOS renders many apps with webviews, GNOME uses gjs to script half the desktop. The time to push back was 10-20 years ago, it's too late to revert now.

[cosmic_cheese]

They’re still fairly uncommon in macOS, mostly being used in places related to cloud service settings. SwiftUI and Catalyst (iOS bridge) are both much more common than webviews, and AppKit remains ubiquitous.

Meanwhile on Windows major features like the Start menu are written in React.

Worth noting that WebKit webviews also tend to be more lightweight than their Chromium brethren.

[jech]

> GNOME uses gjs

I don't think gjs is a webview. It uses JavaScript, granted, but binds to a native toolkit, not to DOM and CSS.