Luckily for me, i have the ultimate power so i can just say "Firefox doesn't support that. I don't use chrome. period."
But lately i had to start saying Safari doesn't support that so we would lose all iphones, or we can start investigate after we have a working solution. God damn react.
The advantage of the web app is that it just works, without installation, so there's no friction there. I'd very much prefer a native app, but the overhead is quite high, no?
macOS spoiled me.
Not any more, I kept windows 11 around for gaming but I binned the partition, how they managed to make a 7950X3D/7900XTX feel "clunky" is astounding given that I live in KDE which has a reputation for been a "heavy" DE and yet it it feels instantaneously fast in every dimension compared to windows 11.
Full disclosure: I use KDE almost exclusively.
(in case anyone needs a reminder of Microsoft's org chart: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...)
To be a little glib:
As someone who has worked for a few Big Software Companies, I guarantee that Microsoft's org chart has changed significantly at least once in the last fourteen years.
Re-organizations aren't referred to as "shuffling the deck chairs [on the Titanic]" by the rank and file for no reason, yanno?
But maybe that impression is wrong and they now cooperate better. After all since some Windows 10 update the Windows Explorer can even create files and folders starting with a dot (which from a kernel, fs and cmd perspective was always valid)
Based on my experience with Blasted Corporate Hellscapes, I find it very unlikely that they cooperate better. Middle-ish management lives to stab each other in the back, belly, and face.
> ...Windows Explorer can even create files and folders starting with a dot...
That's progress! Does Windows Explorer still shit the bed when you ask it to interact with a file whose name contains the '|' character? That's always been valid in NTFS, and I think is valid in at least a subset of the Windows programming interfaces.
Every place I've worked which did not use react had steady pushback from UI/UX to move to react. It took active resistance to not use react, even though it didn't make any sense to use.
https://engineering.fb.com/2014/10/31/ios/making-news-feed-n...
But to edit large document, visualize any large corpus with side by side comparison, unless we plug our mobile on a large screen, a keyboard and some arrow pointer handler, there is no real sane equivalent to work with on mobile.
As much as I like super snappy and efficient native apps, we just gotta accept that no sane company is going to invest significant resources in something that isn’t used 99%+ of the time. WhatsApp (and the world) is almost exclusively mobile + web.
So it’s either feature lag, or something like this. And these days most users won’t even feel the 1GB waste.
I think we’re not far away from shipping native compiled to Wasm running on Electron in a Docker container inside a full blown VM with the virtualization software bundled in, all compiled once more to Wasm and running in the browser of your washing machine just to display the time. And honestly when things are cheap, who cares.
It depends what metrics are considered. We can’t continue to transform earth into a wasteland eternally just because in the narrow window it takes as reference a system disconnect reward from long terms effects.
But for real, the average number of apps people downloading get fewer year over year. When the most popular/essential apps take up more RAM, this effect will only exacerbate. RAM prices have also doubled over the last 3 months and I expect this to hold true for a couple more years.
Let google do it on your behalf.
Maybe what you thinking is a wasm runtime like wasmer.
I completely agree it would be better to rethink what we want and have markup/code/etc optimised to the task of rendering applications. I don't think it'll happen unfortunately.
They had to stop because native widgets aren't secure enough.
JIT compiling, native graphics, quick and easy online deployment into sandboxes, support for desktop standards like keypresses, etc.
It feels like the web ate up the windows desktop experience instead of that experience spreading cross-platform and dominating.
And from a manager's point of view it seems wasteful to develop the same feature across multiple platforms. And if you look at the numbers it does, but numbers-driven development has been a huge issue for a long time now. They don't consider performance or memory usage a factor, and perceived performance is "good enough" for a web app.
Ever since UX and UIs started to be driven mainly by metrics and numbers, I felt something started going wrong already. Since then (the decades...), I've learned about "McNamara fallacy" which seems to perfectly fit a lot of "modern" software engineering and product management today:
> The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy) [...] involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.
Happy to learn otherwise, but might be a datapoint on user behaviour (which could also drive corporate choices).
When a developer/company decides to not implement things local and proper way and push it out and be done with it regardless of the resources the product use on the users' system, I mark the company as lazy and cheap, actually.
Shoving the complexity and cost to users' is being inconsiderate.
I guess it's because they decided to make the web client first-class, and instead of maintaining a native client for each platform (windows, mac, linux...) they opted to just serialize all non-mobile uses (which probably aren't that important to them to begin with) to web.
You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you can actually implement stuff like this in a performant and offline-sensitive way.
But, yeah, by the time the resulting GPU worker process balloons up to 400MB, that pretty much goes out of the window. I'm actually sort-of impressed, in that I have no idea how I would even make that happen! But that's why I don't work at a powerhouse like Meta, I guess...