Re:Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
by the8472 on Sunday November 13, 2016 @03:36AM
(#12942444)
The problem of the browser environment is that it is yet another, less-powerful abstraction level on top of the operating system.
And the worst thing is that it is a hermetically sealed abstraction. There is no escape hatch to access the underlying primitives in those cases where you need them. Even virtual machines offer device passthrough these days for those cases where the virtualization overhead is too expensive and you need exclusive, direct access to some hardware. You could even assign the device to a container inside the VM.
Browsers offer no such way to punch through all the abstraction layers.
And the worst thing is that it is a hermetically sealed abstraction. There is no escape hatch to access the underlying primitives in those cases where you need them. Even virtual machines offer device passthrough these days for those cases where the virtualization overhead is too expensive and you need exclusive, direct access to some hardware. You could even assign the device to a container inside the VM.
Browsers offer no such way to punch through all the abstraction layers.
They don't even speak berkeley sockets.