Comment by garganzol
21 hours ago
The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich.
What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-level windows.
Another PITA: Electron apps repeatedly bundle large portions of Chromium, leading to unnecessary overhead. Those duplicated modules lead to bloated RAM usage: every app has its own Chromium copy and OS must keep all that zoo in RAM without a possibility of reusing the otherwise shareable parts.
not exactly the same, but worth noting that in a spectacular display of being too early, microsoft shipped this 30 years ago (active desktop in 1997 merged the windows explorer with internet explorer, turning folders into web pages).
It is despised for the same reason web based UI is despised today. Firefox OS was also “too early” and failed.
It was more despised for being a gaping security hole than anything else, as I recall - the things you could do with it were really neat demos, but even back then, I said "I am not loading a random website that can access local things every time I log in".
I've been hearing that for 10+ years. This is not going to happen.
This has already happened de-facto. Optimize it properly, and the whole problem disappears.
HTML and CSS are also absurdly hard to actually do anything useful with or interactive compared to normal desktop or app frameworks.
Orders of magnitude more BS, plumbing, awkwardness, head scratching, etc.
That was indeed a pain point, but not anymore after CSS flex layout became available some 10 years ago. It's not worse than WPF for sure. It's even better than WPF because you have access to tons of UI components and toolkits that work everywhere.
Uh huh.
2 replies →
That’s the strategy of 20 years ago.
There's a competing webapp-wrapper framework that explicitly uses the platform's own browser, but developers don't like being at the mercy of whatever the OS ships...
> sufficiently performant
In no universe is HTML performant compared to actual desktop applications. It sucks big time.