Comment by boomlinde

> Prior to canvas, you had Flash and server-side rendered round-tripped graphs. You really think this was better?

Bringing up flash here is like responding to an argument against capital punishment with "prior to lethal injection, you had firing squads, which do you think is better?"

> Hit the back button, or clear all your caches, and you're done, but otherwise, it's fire and forget.

Then of course websites can override the behavior of the navigation buttons...

> The installable App model creates "shit work". Everytime I install something, it permanently takes up both screen real estate, and storage, and creates a cleanup task for me to delete it at a later date. Steve Jobs said "don't give your users shit work", well, app install and uninstall is shit work.

Steve Jobs also thought he could cure his pancreatic cancer with a vegan diet. Perhaps shit work is a necessity if you don't shit laying around in inconvenient places, and this was one of Jobs' neuroticisms that didn't contribute to his genius.

That an app takes up permanent screen real estate is a matter of designing the operating system interface. On my computer, apps certainly don't take up permanent screen real estate.

> I want to use stuff and get work done, and want things to go away if I don't want them without having to become a System Janitor.

I feel the same way and my apartment is currently an absolute mess for this reason.

> The whole app model is a complete reversal of decades of movement to thinner clients, back to the Windows model.

So is the direction of the web, where clients are expected to do more and more work to make the server side application work. This is why computers that were sold as "thin clients" back when this concept was actually considered relevant are now pretty much useless for browsing the web. We're now working towards rich clients for better or for worse.

> Every time I go to a new restaurant, a new milk tea place, a new airport, or a new airline, they're asking me to install their native app. How many god damned United/American/SFO/InAndOut/FiveGuys/Chipotle/Starbucks/et al apps do I need on my device?

In my experience, none. I pay cash, debit card or in some cases using a single phone number based bank transfer app that's ubiquitous in my home country. In no cases have I needed a vendor-specific app to do this. Are you telling me that you can't go to Starbucks and buy coffee without installing their crapware?

> And no, "Instant Apps" are a worse solution to this.

No one mentioned "instant apps" and I've never heard of the concept until now. I agree that it's a stupid and pointless idea. This is not a problem that needs a solution in the first place, and "instant apps"/webapps/whatever are just part of a spectrum of stupid solutions to a stupid and incorrectly posed problem.

The problem they want to solve which is not as stupid, but all the more privacy invasive and manipulative to make up for it, is that of knowing as much about their customers as possible and to be able to push marketing information to them on that basis. To the credit of "instant apps" it only partially solves that problem.

> Form-filling is literally the use case for SGML from the beginning.

Yes, and if you limit your web app to the simple task of letting a user fill a form and submit it you don't need any of the stuff added to browsers in the last 25 years.

> No, we don't need a native-locked-down-walled garden for every physical point of sale in the real world. And since Apple will never own 100% of the market, this means developers will end up needing to write, x2, silly little point of sale apps which clog up people's phones.

No one needs to do that. If you mean that a big web API surface is necessary to create proprietary point of sale systems in a way that's more convenient to the vendor, I consider it only appropriate to limit the API surface to prevent them from doing so.

> Ephemerality, transparency, portability, are desirable properties in addition to security and privacy. Apple leans too much on the latter at the expense of the former with relatively dubious justifications that could be fixed with better design, instead of refusing to participate in improving the specs to meet the desired properties.

It is clearly the case now that security and privacy significantly suffers from the browser API surface.