> If your app is complex enough to need something like this, you probably should make it native anyway

Are we really still making this argument in an era where Figma and Google Docs exist?

Don't they save the files on the cloud? I think this is about having access to local file system.

My point isn’t about local file system access. OP said that if you’re making a complex app it should be native. I was pointing out that millions of people use complex webapps every day, adding file system access is a logical attempt to meet an audience where it is.

I'm not blaming Mozilla here (at least I don't think I should..? Not sure that the «enabler of bad behaviour» argument can really apply here ??)

I wish it wasn't a local filesystem. Google Docs was superior (for me) in that my files were available on every device. To achieve that here would require setting up Dropbox or similar and dealing with edge cases. If this API was more sophisticated with conflict resolution, Firefox could sync these files for me (maybe S3 compatible? I dunno) and then every app could have magical Dropbox/GDrive capabilities instead of a boring old tech folder that gets wiped out every so often.

Yes and Google Docs is not nearly as good as Office or even Apple’s iWork suite.

The existence of two apps that spent countless man-years implementing their apps to run in the browser doesn't make them a good example. Same goes for VS Code which inevitably comes up in these discussions.

Figma literally said they had to build a browser inside the browser: https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...

You’re looking at it from an engineering perspective, I’m looking at it from the user perspective.

I’m not saying the web is the technically best platform to implement a native app, I’m saying that users want to use these complex apps on the web. Making a native app that has to be installed is limiting your audience.

> I’m not saying the web is the technically best platform to implement a native app, I’m saying that users want to use these complex apps on the web. Making a native app that has to be installed is limiting your audience.

As someone who has used Figma since it’s inception I’ve always hated the web interface. I like software being it’s own application with its own suite of tools and shortcuts that are only beholden to the OS, not the OS + Browser.

No. What users want is using complex apps that are smooth, fast, support native behaviors (anything from screen readers to system shortcuts) etc.

They couldn't care less about the tech behind those apps.

Thinking that users "want to use complex apps on the web" is literally what engineers are thinking.

And especially in the actual context of the thread my original point still stands.

We can argue until the end of time about what we think users want and it’ll never get anywhere.

I’d argue “users crave native experiences” is the engineer thinking. I have friends, family and hundreds of coworkers using Google Docs. No one cares.

But this is mostly (?) a historically contingent result of Google heavily advertising for Chrome while Microsoft dragged its feet to have an easy to use package manager, sandboxing, maybe flawed (?) rights management for Windows (a Windows Store comes with it's own issues if controlled by Microsoft of course).

> I’d argue “users crave native experiences” is the engineer thinking. I have friends, family and hundreds of coworkers using Google Docs. No one cares.

They care. They just can't put in words that engineers understand.

"This is slow", "why can't I copy-paste?", "why is it laggy?", "why does my laptop het up?", "why do I have to wait X seconds for this to open"... All these are "users crave native experiences".

On top of that there are power users. Who may not be engineers, but who rely on certain things that exist in the system. From shortcuts (half of which are hijacked by the browser) to offline use to ...

On top of that a decade of moving everything to web tech has taught users to expect shittiness. Many don't even know that it shouldn't take 10+ seconds for an app containing nothing to open. And yet, here we are. Especially if it's an "app" on a spotty network connection.

When I say "no-one cares" I don't mean "they complain endlessly but accept it", I mean "they don't complain". They don't find Google Docs slow (nor for the record do I). They are happy with the solution in their hands.

Copy and paste on the other hand is a great example of the circular logic at work here: it is an issue and when browsers propose an API to fix the issue everyone throws up their hands and says "clipboard access? in a browser?!?!?" just like they are in this thread with filesystem access. Same with offline access via service workers. So it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: web apps are inferior because they don't have features native apps have... and they shouldn't be allowed to have those features because native apps are superior. So around and around we go with the same old debate, the only losers are the users that want to just get on with things.

> When I say "no-one cares" I don't mean "they complain endlessly but accept it", I mean "they don't complain". They don't find Google Docs slow (nor for the record do I).

Again: it's because no one ever asks the right questions or actually watches people work. Or watches these apps in general.

Last year Google Docs consumed 20% of CPU on an M1 to scroll a two-page empty document. "They are happy with the solution in their hands".

> Copy and paste on the other hand is a great example of the circular logic at work here: it is an issue and when browsers propose an API to fix the issue everyone throws up their hands and says "clipboard access? in a browser?!?!?"

Nope. It's not "circular logic". If you look at iOS which actually has app sandboxing that you want on desktop (and that people keep complaining about), you are now notified when an app accesses clipboard. Why? Precisely because of the numerous issues with apps accessing clipboard data.

Again, it's funny how in the name of privacy you're literally arguing for giving web sites all the same access as the desktop apps that you complain are security nightmares.

> Again: it's because no one ever asks the right questions or actually watches people work.

This thread is getting nowhere but I'll leave it with this: the attitude you've outlined here is really patronizing. That these users can't possibly have valid opinions about the tools they use, if they dare to be happy with them they are wrong because you know better than they do. How dare they not care about 20% CPU usage! How dare they!

> it's funny how in the name of privacy

at no point have I made an argument that has anything to do with privacy

> the desktop apps that you complain are security nightmares

nor have I ever claimed desktop apps are security nightmares.

Like I said, I think I'm comfortable wrapping up my contributions here. I don't think conversation beyond this point is productive.

> This thread is getting nowhere but I'll leave it with this: the attitude you've outlined here is really patronizing.

It's not.

> That these users can't possibly have valid opinions about the tools they use, if they dare to be happy with them they are wrong because you know better than they do. How dare they not care about 20% CPU usage! How dare they!

You're ascribing thoughts and words to me that I never said or thought.

> at no point have I made an argument that has anything to do with privacy

What argument did you then make? We're literally in the context of why these things are the way the are due to privacy concerns

> I don't think conversation beyond this point is productive.

I don't think it was ever meant to be productive with opening like "you're thinking like an engineer and can't ever imagine what a user thinks or does"

I've had tons of friends, family, and co-workers complain that Google Docs' performance is astonishingly shit, and the UI terrible. I know one non-nerd writer who does all his writing in some old-ass version of OpenOffice (yes, not even LibreOffice) specifically because he finds Google Docs' poor performance intolerable—so bad that a giant, slow hog like OpenOffice is much better! For my part, I use Pages, because it's got about 2% the effective impact on my overall system responsiveness, of having a Google Docs tab open, and doesn't have painful input latency like GDocs.

It's free and available everywhere, so you're not imposing on anyone when you share a doc with them. That's the appeal. ~Nobody I know actually likes it. Googlebucks delivering free service is the reason it's dominant. Easy to win a competition by burning cash.

Users would prefer a better product (I'm certain a much better one could even be delivered in the browser—Google's god-awful at writing efficient customer-facing software, especially on the Web) but GDocs wins due to subsidies and network effects. Its winning has little to do with whether customers would prefer native (or just somewhat better in-browser) software.

Native v. non-native, maybe they don't care, but good, yes, they care.

They absolutely care, you just don't listen because you are so self centered you think your opinion and needs are more important.

Users CONSTANTLY bitch about how slow the internet is, and people who grew up with microsoft office in school complain about how mediocre google docs is.

Are you really using Google Docs as an example of the best that can be done ? (Assuming it's even a morally acceptable example, we are on Hacker News, aren't we ?)

(Also, this isn't so much about the best that can be done, but about what your median developer is able to do and/or median user is going to have to deal with.)

At no point did I say Google Docs is the best that can be done. But the efficiency with which it matched Office and blew OpenOffice out of the water ought to be of note. People weren’t just okay with office software in their browser, they flocked to it.

I don’t really see what Hacker News has to do with it. Are we supposed to deny the popularity of things because we don’t think they’re technically impressive enough?

Ignore those comments. There is a very large group of people on hacker news who do not understand and will never understand how real world products work. In their mind, native is better than a web app and that's the only way things should work.

Are we still pretending that Figma and Google Docs are good examples of applications? I want the native application features that my OS provides, not the half-baked, lowest-common-denominator kludges found in web/Electron apps.

If you can give me some native APIs which solve distribution and sandboxing, across the three major desktop OSes and two major mobile OSes, as easily as the web, then I would be more than happy to go back to native dev :D

"Waaah waah I get paid six figures to npm install and don't want to actually do any work but still want to be called an engineer"

Seriously it's pathetic. Stop making my computing environment worse just because you are too lazy to learn some desktop APIs

Come on, this is an absurd response. I'm sure most of us here would love to while away untold hours learning desktop APIs for Windows and Mac, then picking up mobile APIs for iOS and Android. But in the real world we have jobs that have deadlines that do not facilitate rewriting and redistributing at least four different versions of a product. When it comes to delivering a write once deploy anywhere solution the web has no peer.

I'm not particularly happy about that but it's the way the world works. Calling people who work on the web "lazy" is a ridiculous response. Maybe you should get to work on the one size fits all native framework that will rival the web?

I mean, Mac/iOS App Store apps are already sandboxed and easily distributable.

Windows, Android, and Linux all have stores/package managers and I assume/hope some level of sandboxing.

Building 5 apps using totally separate APIs for 5 different kinds of sandboxes, and then jumping through the arcane and hostile hoops of 5 different app stores (or 50, if you want to support all the linux distros), does not exactly count as “solved across platforms as easily as the web”

> the browser interface is going to get in the way

Glad I’m not the only one who get irritated with browser chrome and other “browserisms” like having to include a bespoke menu system that web apps uses instead of the macOS global menubar because browser menus already occupy it.

Google Docs for instance would be a lot more nice and clean without the clutter of the browser toolbar and redundant menu system eating up all that vertical space. It’s simple enough to hack together a WebKit/Electron wrapper to get you the first half, but you’re stuck with the redundant menubar no matter what.

Actually now that I’m thinking about it, it seems like a massive oversight that the PWA spec doesn’t seem to have anything for desktop menus.