No one has listed the ten awesome features that we're going to get from HTML Firefox (cause there ain't many) or the 1,000 features (tons of little details) that will be lost. If users listed their 10 biggest problems with Firefox I doubt any of them would be solved by moving to HTML.
Imagine if instead of writing VSCode from scratch and releasing it alongside Visual Studio Microsoft had rewritten the Visual Studio UI in HTML, abandoned all the nonessential features, and abandoned the old native Visual Studio.
One might say that Mozilla will wait to release the new Firefox till it has all the old features of the old Firefox, but that's not been my experience with how teams work. They'll get frustrated with the rewrite and want to get it out the door. "We can add those features later" they will say, and then they'll never get added.
Ah, but maintaining XUL means working on old code (which is boring), but moving Firefox to HTML means working on new shiny code (which is exciting).
Instead, they plan to render the UI natively, with only "some" parts in HTML.
So, instead of XUL + HTML, we’re going to get GTK + WinForms + Cocoa + HTML. Great, eh?
And we lose the ability to style it with addons – your themes can only change the background image of the header bar, that’s it.
And the remaining addons can’t modify the UI (tree style tabs, bottom tabs, etc) anymore either, instead you can only modify page content.
I’m seriously pissed off now, because Firefox was the last browser where I could actually customize it how I liked it.
I hope the person who made this decision is going to have to use software without any config options and with horrible defaults, like GNOME. For the rest of their life. May their car always have have either 60°C+ heat, or -20°C AC, may their screen of their phone always either be too dark, or too bright.
Official statement from the Mozilla post in the discussion regarding removal of support for "heavyweight" themes. Emphasis mine.
That’s a pretty clear statement that it won’t be 100% HTML.
Also, the fact that "arbitrary styling and scripting" won’t be possible is another issue.
Tell me how I am supposed to write an addon that adds tab-previews as thumbnails when you hover over a tab like Vivaldi is doing it: http://i.imgur.com/vqysJs1.png ?
How am I supposed to write an addon that colors the navbar and the current tab in the theme color given by the HTML, or, if not existing, the favicon?
With current addons I can do that, with the new addon system, I’m seriously fucked.
The Palemoon developers understand the folly of ditching the flexibility of the XUL interface. They won't be removing it.
Lucky them.
So, a fork is a rough solution and will have maintenance issues for an app this size.
But these rants are just silly. XUL is a technology that needlessly duplicates what HTML/CSS do these days. And if you ever want to have a smooth transition to servo, which solves real, deep problems, having a html UI is going to be dramatically important.
I'm just really discouraged with how more and more desktop apps are being written in HTML, CSS and Javascript and suffer in quality as a result.
As long as Moore's law provides enough lift under our wings, RAM usage is one of the less important aspects of an application. However, I fear the trend of building application UI's in HTML/CSS because invariably it will lead to wildly inconsistent look, feel and behavior.
Sigh. I feel old.
Realistically, getting to feature parity after rewriting a core part of any application is going to be nearly impossible. You end up with different features, hopefully better ones, but not exactly the ones you had before you started. You can't step twice in the same river.
I'm 25 and I feel to old for this industry already.
It's annoying. I miss Web 1.0. Add just a bit of dynamic functionality plus broadband and it would be fine for 80-90% of cases. And FAST!
Instead, we get Web 2.0, 3.0 (4?) which makes pages on 40-50Mbps load like my old 28Kbps modem on AOL. Seriously...?
It should be easy to find performance numbers showing how Firefox 42 renders old, pre-CSS pages slower than, say, Netscape 4, then.
Netscape 4 didn't have a JIT, didn't use hardware accelerated layers, trapped into kernel mode for GDI calls, didn't use accelerated SIMD for painting, and didn't have HTTP 2. It barely had any optimizations for dynamic restyling, so tons of stuff would get reflowed when it didn't have to. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Browsers have gotten more complex, but the complexity is often in the service of making things faster.
And I never mentioned Netscape: it was called Netscrape then and hackers despised it. I used Opera and IE mainly.
In the late '90s, the time frame this thread is about, it was well known that the layout engines at the time were not dynamic: they could not in general reflow only parts of the page. Everything else I mentioned in the post that triggered this subthread is obvious simply based on browser engine and OS history.
> (Netscape 4/Opera/IE) didn't have a JIT, didn't use hardware accelerated layers, trapped into kernel mode for GDI calls, didn't use accelerated SIMD for painting, and didn't have HTTP 2. It barely had any optimizations for dynamic restyling, so tons of stuff would get reflowed when it didn't have to.
The features of a program = functionality.
So we're getting our wires crossed due to word choice.
In any case, I'll admit this has dragged on long enough. Truce?
It was just faster, better looking, and skinnable. Plus malware stayed hitting IE so there was that too.
Disabling js has given me the fastest turn-round on page-load times. It's usually not the browser, but loading 15 different un-optimized JS engines that causes the problem.
I must say: Atom Editor is great. Using HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop/mobile apps really makes sense to me, especially given that:
- You only have to support one rendering engine. - You have access to the latest Web Components/ES6/CSS3 features. - You can rely on native Node.js modules when needed.
It's good for portability, HTML/CSS became better at UI, JS becomes a better language, current IDEs are great, live debugging tools are great.
- There are far fewer native components, leaving accessibility down to the developer of the app and making it nonexistant.
- Platform integration is impossible, which means there is no way for the framework, for example, to create widgets differently on OS X, Windows or Linux (these platforms have many different conventions)
- Theming globally becomes impossible. If you want to write a dark theme for your desktop, you go from writing a theme once for GTK and once for Qt to once for each and every app you run. Uuuurgh.
But only supporting one rendering engine, yay! Much better than the 6 different engines we have to support in Qt (huh?).
And having access to all the latest JS additions! ... that were copied from other languages you could develop desktop apps in, because JS is a terrible hack.
And relying on native Node.js modules, yay! As opposed to native modules for literally every other better language out there.
I'm not sure what you're actually comparing this workflow to. Maybe one day writing HTML apps will be great, but today is not that day. Today, writing HTML apps is only beginning to be an idea that doesn't completely suck. But for the user, it does massively suck. Massive apps that ship their own copy of webkit/blink/whathaveyou, with security flaws that won't get patched, disgusting performance on low-end hardware, atrocious battery usage and decades of UX knowledge thrown out of the window just because the app developer doesn't have the knowledge to see it.
I don't look forward to this. And I'm younger than you.
So web apps can't have reusable components now?
> "And having access to all the latest JS additions! ... that were copied from other languages you could develop desktop apps in, because JS is a terrible hack."
WebAssembly will take over for web apps eventually.
> "decades of UX knowledge thrown out of the window"
UX knowledge isn't toolkit dependent, UX knowledge is just as applicable on the web. You can make a dog of an app with any toolkit, native toolkits offer no guarantees for good UX, you can only hope that designers choose to follow best practices.
I'm not saying they can't, I'm saying they don't. You go ahead and try to fix that, create widget#772981 that still won't support typed-selection, or will break with large text or what not... I've seen too many of those, most of them bad, and none of them standard. So far, React is the only thing that even comes close to a sane model for a contender to UI development on the desktop, and it still mostly fails the accessibility checkbox.
> WebAssembly will take over for web apps eventually.
More eventualism. Do you have evidence for that? Do you even have evidence that it'll be better than what we have now in other languages if it does take over?
> UX knowledge isn't toolkit dependent
A lot of it is. You'd be surprised just how much UX is crammed into Qt Widgets for example. Years of experience making them more accessible, more usable, more consistent with the platform they're running on, etc.
They already do. Electron, Web Components, etc...
> "Do you even have evidence that it'll be better than what we have now in other languages if it does take over?"
Compare the performance of vanilla JS vs. asm.js. It is clear from what developers have stated that WebAssembly performance will exceed the performance of asm.js, the threading improvements alone should offer noticeable benefits.
> "Years of experience making them more accessible, more usable, more consistent with the platform they're running on, etc."
So what are we looking at to replicate that? A theme per platform? Some accessibility work? What else?
It should be noted that the web isn't starting from zero with UX either, we've already had 20+ years of refinements to the web user experience.
And nobody can agree on which to use. It's not standard if it's just "some set of components some people reuse". A far cry from standardization.
> Compare the performance of vanilla JS vs. asm.js.
That's not what I'm comparing. I'm comparing the performance of native toolkits vs web toolkits on asm.js. It pales in comparison, and the battery usage is through the roof. ymmv?
> So what are we looking at to replicate that?
1. Standardization of components (developer does not have to build their own scrolling system, context menu, etc) 2. Themability of components at the application level (developer can style components not to clash with the style of the application) 3. Themability of components at the platform level (user can style the application not to clash with the style of their own desktop) 4. Performance needs to shoot way, way up. Apps can't rely on a performant GPU, it's unreasonable to ask that of every device at this point in time. Some day maybe every device will come with their own high performance GPU, but eventualism cannot excuse bad coding practices and unnecessary layering.
The rest should follow. But I still don't see us getting any of those things, any time soon. These are not easy problems to solve.
Atom uses Electron, VS Code uses Electron, Light Table uses Electron (starting with v0.8).
As for the web side, web apps are a young field, what else would you expect?
There are certainly popular UI elements, Bootstrap for example.
If you want to make an web app that looks native, using React Native could be a good solution.
He is comparing it to what they have now, XUL + CSS + JavaScript. Replacing it with html isn't as big a change as it sounds, their UI is already written in XML and rendered by Gecko, all they are doing is moving from a custom XML like XAML(MS) or FXML(Java) to standard HTML rendered by Gecko.
<rant>
This is lost in a sea of replies now but I'm sure pissed off Mozilla is completely losing their root mantra of fighting for the free web. Persona, Thunderbird, two critical components of a "free web": free global authentication, free email client. I'm sure next mozfest the same suits as every year will talk about how they're so proud of "keeping the web open". What a crock of crap. Firefox isn't even that good of a browser anymore.
</rant>
This is one of the reasons why iPads have stalled - pro developers can't make money, for well documented reasons. The web equivalent will be the starving of open communication, thought and creativity, leading to homogeneous noise as a poor substitute for ground-breaking content.
Mostly I think it is an effort vs reward thing. Thunderbird doesn't have the user base and doesn't have a revenue stream the way fire fox sells the search box. I wonder if anyone over there has thought about cleaning it up and selling it as a white label email client.
So, developer convenience trumps user experience? Who cares about your battery run time, how hot your PC runs, the bandwidth overhead, the massive attack surface from all the useless components shipped, how badly the webapp integrates into your OS, as long as we can ship faster and faster?
As a developer, I feel that it's easier for me to create good user experience (nice UI, easy non-blocking I/Os by default, etc).
I don't say it's flawless, I say it's now becoming a very good alternative.
Is all that bullshit really worth… whatever we're saving? (Our company is mainly saving in developer salaries, because we can force kids fresh out of school to work for minimum wage, instead of hiring experienced developers… we'll see how long this keeps working.)
For some less positive feedback on Atom, which reinforces some of creshal's points, see the Atom section of this text editor rundown:
http://eev.ee/blog/2015/05/31/text-editor-rundown/
I've also frequently seen complaints to the effect that Atom is much too slow, even on machines only a few years old. Even my 486 laptop back in 1997 could run a text editor with syntax highlighting (specifically, JPad for programming in Java). What are editors doing these days that needs so much CPU power?
> http://eev.ee/blog/2015/05/31/text-editor-rundown/
This review (6 months ago) is based on an early version of Atom Editor (0.204.0), the latest stable (1.2.4) is way more mature and provides very nice packages [1].
node-webkit apps are cheaper to develop. Far cheaper.
Everyone can write a webapp, a native application requires professional developers. The payroll looks completely different.
And then the devs who have only worked with node-webkit don’t know how much better they could have it. I know devs who refuse to use map, reduce and filter, because "it’s black magic and we always used for".
edit: I'll take my downvotes with pleasure. The fact that I am able to use Atom or Nylas N1 or Nuclide on linux with 0 problems alone is enough to welcome proliferation of web tech on desktop.
Look at Code Academy, for example. They add new programming languages and technologies every now and then, but basically it's always the same. Just like their audience. They won't add C to that list, because that wouldn't work for this average not-nerdy-enough-for-real-programming audience.
Real programmers (like me) use C.
Seriously, no. Just no.
And if I wanted to prevent people from writing "the most disastrous code in the whole universe", teaching C instead of JS would be much, much lower in the list than teaching how to split code into modules/libraries, write testable code, etc.
And for me that would be much much lower than teaching how to keeps things simple. The whole modern web has a bad case of over engineering, everything is modules of modules of modules, with so many tools associated you get a headache trying to install a simple JavaScript library (what is wrong with a download link and I drop the lib on my page, nothing that is what).
I'm all for modern approaches but I can't help but feel many developers have lost touch with what writing clean code is, it's not making module, libraries or even tests, it's making sure what you are doing is as simple as it can be and efficient at it. Sadly most modern web stack fail at that. All hidden in mumbo jumbo of modules and dependencies no-one really needed or asked for, often created by people who never questioned the purpose of what they were doing, or if the whole internet needed it (because you are at Google and have found a neat way to deal with your huge JS stack doesn't mean the whole web needed it too, and that you needed to spent a whole lot of effort making people adopt it).
As much as you make fun of C, learning and writing C will teach you to keep you programs simple and efficient, because the language requires it. And that's coming from someone who started programming with Perl, then PHP, and only learned C later on.
Makes thing simple not simpler should be the cardinal rule of programming, not modularize and test everything, those are situational, the former applies all the time.
I didn't make fun of C. I made fun of a comment posted by a C programmer, which is very different. I have absolutely nothing against C.
> C will teach you to keep you programs simple and efficient, because the language requires it
From what I've read, the OpenSSL codebase is definitely not simple, and I'm not sure it's efficient either—it would depend on how you define efficiency. So your affirmation seems factually incorrect.
Other than that, I agree with your post. Simplicity is awesome. No point in using Angular to build a landing page if static HTML can do the job just as well. (Edit: let me take that back. There can be a point: the pleasure of experimenting and learning something new.)
C teaches you how stuff works. Its important.
For instance, you might create a model class, and then you know that model should have a name, shouldn't be able to be saved without a name, the name should be x-number of characters.
Then you can write a series of tests that makes sure that, regardless of how the model implements that name, all your assumptions about what that name should look and act like don't change without throwing a red-flag up to whoever is changing that model.
Making code into reusable modules code is generally a good thing, but it's even better if you make them in a way that will help you test those chunks independently as well - that is testable code.
Then of course you need some way to automatically run these tests, but that's usually provided by IDEs or standard libraries these days.
Edit: most curious downvote ever...
Sometimes it feels like everything was already invented in the 60's.
Reading up on the capabilities of early mainframes is eye-opening if you (like me) grew up on Pentiums.
Close enough... I grew up on XTs, i286, i386, so on :) All of them way weaker than my phone (Not sure if that was what you were referring to).
However, in terms of architecture, algorithms, programming language features... It feels like we haven't advanced too much. Actually, the opposite... we are encourage now to do not be too clever on programming because processing power and memory usage is close to be a commodity and clean code is more important (which is fine but less fun).
Gave examples of what features old ones had in the essay below with the first link mentioning the specific systems for further inspection:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/dan_geer_on_h...
Note: B5500, System/38, and Ten15/FLEX are all especially worth considering. Two were basically HLL machines with type-safety and interface safety enforced at hardware level. System/38 was object-based with HW- and SW-level protections plus portable microcode layer.
I'd say Channel I/O counts as one that kicks modern systems' asses. Servers have been copying it bit by bit over past ten years, maybe even exceeding it, but server OS's are inherently inferior in usage given mainframe OS's are designed for I/O offloading at core. Near interrupt-less architecture with acceleration engines makes many apps scream with performance. And would only cost $10 per CPU on desktops but would require Windows & Linux rewrites. (sighs)
However, the change to the AS/400 and POWER cost it one of its greatest features: hardware-enforced integrity at the object level. That's the feature that would still be giving hackers hell if it was widely deployed. The Intel i432 APX and i960MX had similar property. Interesting enough, IBM actually has secure CPU's they've prototyped and even sold to select customers. Would be great if they integrated one with IBM i at microcode, compiler, and OS levels. That plus an optional interface for new customers without legacy crap would be a huge differentiator that might give it new life.
AMD dropped rings in their 64 bit architecture which Intel was forced to adopt, so they're becoming a historical curiosity.
Not quite. Hypervisors are operating in Ring -1, SMM is equivalent to another ring above that, and I can't find anything about AMD64 dropping Ring 1/2? Ring 0/3 at least are still in use.
http://wiki.osdev.org/SYSENTER
http://www.x86-64.org/pipermail/discuss/2000-October/001068....
I tried looking at the latest 4.2 kernel tree - but the assembler/c-code that sets up and deals with sys-calls has been rather re-factored, so I'm not entirely adamant it's ring 0 and ring 3 for both 32bit and 64bit - but I think so? (From a quick glance, no sections stand out as calling out ring 3 explicitly when talking about returning to user-land -- granted I didn't do any searching over the code).
A couple of minutes with Google only found hints that confirm my memory WRT to AMD64 and rings, and/or Intel not copying a segmentation feature added to later versions of AMD's chips.
There are already cross-platform toolkits that can deliver everything a browser engine can, faster and safely.
Face it, "web technologies" are not winning because of any massive technological advancement, just like C++ wasn't this huge advancement over C. They just managed to achieve enough critical mass to make everything else look less popular. In the '90s, OOP did that through academia and commercial push (in what was a much smaller tech sector); html/css/js did it through the accidental monopoly that is the web browser. The end result is basically the same.
Nothing with the reach of web technologies. The closest I can think of is Qt, but there are issues with deploying Qt apps on some platforms.
• Native applications that give users excellent UX and performance
• Web apps that are equally quirky and slow on every system
?
To give an analogy, it's like programming languages. It's possible to write very fast code with assembly languages, yet their portability to other architectures is practically non-existent. Part of the reason higher level languages like C/C++ are used is because they are much more portable.
http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm
Note: And some that are laughably obvious and available today lol.
So, yes, what people use today is an accident of history. That includes COBOL, C, C++, OOP languages, HTML/CSS/JS, HTTP-centric everything, and especially whatever crap is being built on them next.
If you're curious, here's the history I put together on C language and UNIX in numbered list form. You'll see how IT evolution often works in practice to give us lowest common denominator. And afterwards people swear it was product of good design and great achievement. (rolls eyes)
Smalltalk had (has) messaging and decent object orientation (and you have that especially in latest js) - but Smalltalk never had one standard vm implementation - different versions had different image (ram-saved-to-disk, source code and byte-code) and vms. Javascript has common source code, but no common vm/image format.
Office Suites had rich documents with smart(ish) widgets, but no security - a macro in Excel had access to all your spreadsheet data. Web apps don't really have any good encapsulation either -- so we'll likely repeat the macro-virus era with web virus era (I'm not sure if we already are or not, there's certainly been a few self-replicating ones, that eg spread via facebook updates etc. Not sure if they generally live in the phone-apps or various web-apps. Probably both).
We already had the future of web applications within reach years ago - but apparently no-one cared: http://lively-kernel.org/
Depends what are looking as an equivalent. Browsers didn't exists but markup languages have been around since the 70's (mentioned for first time in late 60's)[1]
Maybe an equivalent to express GUI as resources? yeah, we called it RAD back in the day and they were quit popular among some circles. Does somebody remember Hypercard? Or even the first versions of Visual Basic?
Whoa! They have syntax highlighting! And intellisense! And a package manager!
Kind of like Notepad++ or half a dozen other editors?
I'm not saying "we should NEVER use HTML for native dev", but it's not there yet, and I don't understand the hype around these two tools.
And it nearly killed them.
http://www.pubarticles.com/member/user_img/216/1279777216.jp...
They could still be doing it wrong.
When someone shows me/I find a better way to meet a requirement I will adopt it (static site generators, Go routines, ...). I won't doggedly stick to the first thing I learned; I don't expect the world to adapt to suit me.
Why is that crazy? Makes perfect sense to me, especially as the performance of the programming language element improves. Ultimately these IDEs are sure to make use of WebAssembly, which should take away the remaining performance concerns.
I anyone ever starts making javascript-optimised CPUs and GPUs, they're going to make billions. At the moment we only have micropython, but who knows...
They said the same about Java in the 90s. Java accelerated CPUs never really took off.
> "Formatted copypasting"
Do you need this for a coders editor?
> "usability features"
Like what?
> "network features"
Which network features do you need for a coders editor? In the case of Atom/VS Code, can't think of a single one that a browser engine doesn't already provide. Not going to need things like AD-integration, etc...
> "The OS will become little more than a very expensive pixel pipe."
If that's what people want, then so be it. I see no problem with simplifying the OS, most of them are already too bloated.
> " But that's what people like, because C++ is hard, native widgets are hard to customise, and everyone loves designing interfaces, so that's where we're going."
The main advantage is the cross platform compatibility. If certain OS vendors didn't make it hard to build apps that utilised a common base then there'd be much less drive to produce web apps. It has very little to do with the complexity of C++.
> "I anyone ever starts making javascript-optimised CPUs and GPUs, they're going to make billions."
As I've said a number of times now, the final target with web apps won't be JS, it'll be WebAssembly.
Also, 'expensively' is debatable, I'm sure it'd be possible to have reusable accessibility components, wouldn't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel for each new web app.
Not really, you still a browser that implement all this stuff. The only difference is Open tech vs proprietary.
Open technologies are obviously a good thing. Writing a software as complex as Photoshop for instance with the exact same features with HTML/CSS and JavaScript isn't going to fly and be usable for someone who has to work 10 hours a day on it. The performance issues will be significant. It's not a big deal for an text editor though I still can't open a 5mb log file in Atom for some reasons. No problem with Sublime Text 2 or Vim. Why is this ?
My point is Web techs aren't a silver bullet.
From the same source, apparently the Mozilla Foundation does a lot of important work that the Mozilla Corporation can't/won't do but most of the development is done by the Mozilla Corporation currently (possibly due to not enough donations to the Foundation?).
I haven't really verified that, but thought it was worth pointing out.
Also, there's a generational shift underway. You and me could find crazy that people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a lot of young folks are doing (Atom, VSCode etc etc). That's their world, that's what they like. An entire generation now exists, who learnt to code from web scripting rather than C or BASIC. They have taken over. It's just how it is.
(this said, I agree that donating to Mozilla feels a bit silly, looking at how much money they make from commercial agreements. It's like donating to Ubuntu or RedHat.)