Sometimes I see people mourn a mythical reality where cross-platform desktop development is simple, easy, and preferred. They lay the blame for stagnation in cross-platform development on the web.

I just don't get it. The web is a sandboxed environment that everyone can run. I can understand hating Electron, but the web? I don't think users these days want to install Netflix or Facebook on their desktops.

People want native applications, but they will not want to pay for it. Cross platforms toolkits suck. There are frameworks for Android/IOS cross platform development like Xamarin and they suck, companies tend to move away from them after some time as more integrations to the platform are desired. Windows no longer even has a proper native toolkit unless you use old Win32/WPF, I hold MAUI or whatever they call it today a joke. Linux has GTK/QT clusterfuck. Try makin non-OSS application for Linux. There isn't even a single Linux target, instead you need to target each distribution to do it properly, there are many, and few users. Clusterfuck. Only MacOS has a decent desktop toolkit.

Electron/Web let's you bypass all this shit, mostly. Also, the only reason why Linux desktop is actually useful to me is those webapps those people hate. It just makes sense to target web first.

I just wish there was more separation of website and webapp in the browsers. Two different things, in my opinion.

> People want native applications

I and many others really, really don't. I prefer webapps for almost everything except things that need full access to things like filesystems, hardware, etc.

I want my mail, calendar, chat, videos, etc. to fully live in my browser where I have consistent management of tabs, bookmarks, extensions, logins and so on. I also really, really don't want to install applications unless needed.

> I just wish there was more separation of website and webapp in the browsers

Sure, that might be nice, but it also might create the opportunity for webapps to require being put in the "webapp" pool, and I really like just being able to run them as a website once and then just close the tab.

I think what you are describing is mostly what we already have with PWAs?

> People want native applications

When? You think the average consumer wants to download a facebook app on their laptop? To be negged with updates vs just visiting the site?

I buy that the HN crowd wants native apps.

> Regardless if you feel that the web was made only for documents it has become the only truly cross platform runtime you can always expect users to have installed. That's incredibly valuable. Why would we throw that away?

That's not much better than "everyone runs Windows" (but is a good way to view this). (And yes, you cover choosing an OS later in the post.)

What happens is that a select few browsers have what's considered at this point the runtime. So you are always leaving people out. Maybe the runtime price tag in itself isn't a problem now, but the hardware might be. The interface. And there will certainly be users who just want to avoid the low-contrast always-animating nature of some sites, for example.

Nowadays to me the environment is pretty much like Microsoft in the late 90s, early 2000s with their Windows+Office monopoly, and cultures that saw no problem is assuming that was available. But now, instead of these two, we're all expected to be running one of the select browsers that implement a recent enough version of the "living standards", and with powerful enough hardware and graphics acceleration.

But still, in some cases it has to be more complicated to make sites incompatible with other browsers and in the absence of javascript. Recently, I think I read something attributing trends in loading and rendering using javascript to the way Google ranks entries in search results.

> That's not much better than "everyone runs Windows"

It's absolutely better. It's open standards based instead of proprietary, all current engines are opensource, there are multiple implementations.

> select few browsers

There are three current engines, and I try https://ladybird.dev/ every now and then. It's gotten pretty good and proves that even with a small team you can write a browser that will work with many sites.

> And there will certainly be users who just want to avoid the low-contrast always-animating nature of some sites, for example.

You could make all of that without JS. I'm not sure why people keep conflating the language with the design decisions the website author took. Just HTML+CSS is enough to make all the badly designed sites you want.

>You could make all of that without JS. I'm not sure why people keep conflating the language with the design decisions the website author took. Just HTML+CSS is enough to make all the badly designed sites you want.

Yup, now days you can make pretty good animation site with out JS! Why are people insisting on using JS to be a criteria to see a web page? Could be that the some big players are using it to fingerprint users?

There are sites which load the content dynamically using javascript, there are even sites where this is done with the content already in the served HTML document, as JSON.

There are sites that blank the viewport until scripts change css rules or class names, or load stylesheets.

The latter is especially noticeable when such a site has absolutely no error checking or fallback and stops on some javascript error, leaving the page "blank".