Re:Ask HN: Why does the modern web hate users?
by wusspuss on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @09:05PM
(#30095229)
>Back in the day you could just send everyone the same HTML/JS/CSS rendered on your server and it would work for everyone.
HN itself works perfect on mobile or anywhere for that matter and is very lightweight. I don't think it's because they optimized it. They just didn't fuck with it.
>Now things are more complicated: people want "native apps" on their Android and iOS
Do people want those? I believe it's just companies shoving those down people's throats
Re:Ask HN: Why does the modern web hate users?
by scarface74 on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @10:07AM
(#30086363)
But with mobile apps, you can cache more assets on the client and in the case if iOS, as much work as Apple does to optimize WebKit. Objective C/Swift is still much faster.
Mobile apps are also more bloated than needed. But at least you only have to load them once.
Then again, client side frameworks started taking off in 2012.
I think it actually has a lot more to do with mobile. Back in the day you could just send everyone the same HTML/JS/CSS rendered on your server and it would work for everyone.
Now things are more complicated: people want "native apps" on their Android and iOS and whatnot, and also want a "desktop" version and a "web version".
So you build a "light" server API, and put a lot of logic in the frontend. Not to save money, but because all the frontend logic is different on every platform (and in different languages: JS on web, Java or Kotlin on Android, Obj-C or Swift on iOS).
Mobile complicated these things a lot more than people realize.