Don't get me wrong, it is amazing progress given the technology you have to fight. But in absolute terms it's not that great.
The great thing about native development is the long-term stability of all the components. I have access to a broad range of good-looking UI components with simple layout mechanisms, a small but robust SQL database, a rock-solid IDE and build tools - all of which haven't changed much in the past decade. Plus super-fast performance and a great range of libraries.
To put it in terms of the article: the half-life of native desktop knowledge is much longer than 10 years. Almost everything I learnt about native programming 10 years ago is relevant now.
Unfortunately, the atrocious deployment situation for native apps is also unchanged in 10 years (ie. "This program may harm your computer - are you really sure you want to run it?"). But on the other hand having a native app has allowed me to implement features like "offline mode" and "end-to-end encryption" that would be difficult or impossible in a web app. This has given my business a distinct advantage over web-based alternatives.
Everything else seems like stuff that makes things better for the developers but not much visible benefit to the user. I can understand where a comment about the web not being much better would come from, on the scale of a decade.
Go back 20 years, and you're talking about a completely different world; frames, forms, webrings, and "Best viewed with IE 4.0". But if '96 to '06 was a series of monumental leaps, '06 to '16 looks like some tentative hops.
Few websites use them effectively yet, at least in a way that benefits the consumer (several are using them to benefit marketers). This could be because developers don't know about them, consumers don't care about them, or perhaps just not enough time has passed. XHR was introduced in 1999, after all, but it took until 2004 before anyone besides Microsoft noticed it.
I think many of us underestimate what was possible to do in browsers. What has happened is that these features have been democratised: what took them months to build I can now pull of using WebRTC in the space of a weekend.
The thing is - the polish matters. You can't do viable consumer apps until they actually work like the consumer wants, which is often decades after the technology preview. You could emulate websockets using IFRAMES, script tags, and long-polling back in the late 90s, but a.) you'd get cut off with the slightest network glitch and b.) you'd spend so much time setting up your transport layer that you go bankrupt before writing the app.
They're taken for granted in native application programming, yes, but the big advantage of browsers is the zero-cost, on-demand install. This is a bit less of an advantage than it was in 2003 (where new Windows & Flash security vulnerabilities were discovered almost every day, and nobody dared install software less their computer be pwned), but there are still many applications where getting a user to install an app is a non-starter.
Ditto. I like having a copy of a program that no one but me has access to modify, and I like that I don't have to rely on my ISP to use my computer. If I like a program, I don't want it to change until I choose to change it. I don't want to be A/B tested, marketed to, etc. I'd rather buy a license and be happy =)
And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now. In fact, I'd say that "open link in new tab" is dead on most of the new web "applications", I'm actually surprised when it works. The same goes for the "go back with backspace" thingie, which Google just killed for no good reason.
Copy-paste is also starting to become a nuisance on lots of websites. sometimes when I try to do it a shitty pop-up shows up with "post this text you've just copied to FB/Twitter" or the app just re-directs me to somewhere else. It reminds me of the Flash-based websites from around 2002-2003, when they were all the rage.
Use the basic HTML version. It's worse in a few ways but better in most others. Including speed.
Back with backspace!
On top of that I actually have no "CMD" key on my keyboard, I have a "Ctrl" key which I assume is the same as "CMD" (I also have a key with the Windows logo which I had assumed it was the CMD key, I was wrong). KISS has gone out of the window long ago.
The outlook Web app on the other hand sometimes blocks backspace from deleting a character, presumably to stop you inadvertently jumping back from inside a text field. This is only "on" when inside a text field in the first place, so if MS could do it, I don't see why Google's better engineers couldn't.
> The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago.
What's laughable is how much effort has gone into rebuilding something in this platform with a result that is nearly the same (but worse) as what existed 20 years ago.
x86 CPUs, web browsers, popular operating systems, and so on are all examples of this problem. At some point I really wish we could do something different, practical reasons be damned. It's sad that as many cool, "new" things we have, some of the core, basic ideas and goals are implemented so poorly and we are effectively stuck with them. This is one reason I hate that almost all software and hardware projects are so rushed, and that standards bodies are the opposite, but with only the bad things carried over. The cost of our bad decisions often weighs for much longer than anyone could imagine, just ask anyone who has designed a programming language or something major in software ecosystems.
As much as I enjoy all the new, shiny stuff, it makes me sad thinking about BBSs and old protocols Gopher that represented the old guard, alternate routes, and the fact that we really haven't come that far. Overall things of course are a lot better, but in many ways I often feel like we're treating the symptoms and not the cause or just going around in circles.
I could go on, but the rant would be novel length.
I don't see any opportunity in the future for any person or company to take all the lessons learned in the last 50 years and build something new that takes it into account.
Same with browsers; It's only now that we kinda know what a browser really needs to be but there's no way to start from scratch with all those lessons and build a new kind of web browser. There is always going to need to be what they currently are and build on what was already done.
I understand why, but it's still kind of sad.
It's almost like saying Microsoft Word is cross-platform because I can RDP into a Windows machine from Linux. It's not really part of Linux, it needs a client to access an application running on a remote server. The only difference is how complex the client is.
The flip side of that equation is that poor practical choices never improve because there will only be more platforms to target.
If we made development decisions based on technological constraints alone, how is it supposed to improve?
Your whole multiplatform thing is disingenuous because back then there really was only 1 platform. Windows. So you've conveniently forgotten about the lotus suite, etc.
I also think you're vastly overestimating how far we've come in that timespan. Like v8 was pretty much 95% of the improvements, simply because you could do more than 1000 loops in JavaScript without killing the browser.
And yet today it is still harder to make a decent web app than it was in VB6 15 years ago.
the that time you had to learn a lot of new stuff in a short time too.
I spent four hours just to find that the latest and greatest express don't have the simple global site protection with a password (that it had in version 3) like with .htaccess - it is just not possible anymore. There were no elegant solutions.
There may be some marginal progress while doing complex stuff, but doing the simple is harder and harder with each passing year.
Here is a simple question - is making working UI now easier than with MFC circa 1999. If the answer is no- than that progress is imaginary.
Every new thing is strongly opinionated, doesn't work and relies on magic. Debugging is nightmare and we have layers upon layers of abstractions.
Please for the love of Cthulhu - if any of you googlers, facebookers, twitterers read this - next time you start doing the next big thing let these 3 be your guiding lights - the code and flow must be easy to understand, it should be easy to debug, it should be easy to pinpoint where in the code something happens - all of the frameworks' benefits become marginal at best if I have to spend 4 hours finding the exact event chain and context and place in the framework that fires that ajax request.
/rant over
iCloud's office apps use Sproutcore, which eventually forked into Ember (though the original Sproutcore project still exists).
My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.