Yeah this is honestly where I stopped reading. The ship has long-since sailed on this one - on-demand software clearly wins on utility over local software in most cases, a fact which is proven by how dominant web is over native software despite it's many shortcomings.

I actually think what we need to advance software is a better stack/tooling for web to bring it closer to the native experience. I.e. I can imagine a world where my laptop is mostly a platform for running WASM/WebGPU code downloaded from network on demand - and it would be nice if that type of software was not so reliant on the browser as a middle-man.

I spend a lot of time on websites where I rely on JavaScript (Google Maps, navigating GitHub etc.), but it's always the same handful of sites. Having a "Trust this Website" button to whitelist these places would totally work. Everyone else can serve me static HTML or lose me as a visitor. (I realize that's kind of what NoScript extensions achieve, but they're not a standard with enough momentum.)

For instance, the modern web is a UX nightmare - every time you go to a site, you get bombarded with popups, requests to send notifications etc.

But how can you define which level of interactivity is allowed on a document without limiting creativity and the potential of the platform to grow?

I don't think the solution is in trying to draw such a line. I think the solution is to build something that covers 80% of the use cases, AND makes it sublimely easier than the technology we use today, AND is backed by someone with the power to deliver it to users.

There are examples in our history where we rejected a complex technology in favor of a simpler one, so there is some precedence. Remember HTML 3.0?

I wish it was, perhaps may be by numbers i.e. websites vs native software but if we take mobile ecosystem, native applications rule and many of the web pages are just landing pages for those mobile apps.

Smartphones are the first computers for majority of the world and significant population among them would have never opened a browser to enter an URL but perhaps would have used WhatsApp to click a link and opened it in built-in browser.

Even in web, mobile visitors has long overtaken desktop but again how much of it is organic i.e. direct or search when compared to those from social media, chat apps which again are likely to be native apps(and opened in built-in browser).

After a decade of developing mobile(native) apps for all major platforms I've quit native mobile app development and have started to focus my efforts back on web; My audience are intentionally those who wouldn't mind using a web application but I still occasionally receive questions from a new user like 'Is there an app for this'.

I strongly believe that until the duopoly in mobile ecosystem is fixed, Web is under serious threat.

Largely because iphone doesn't let you install a proper browser that doesn't lack most features from the past decade, and iphone users is where the money is at so that is what companies targets.

Easier than typing a web page once and then maybe clicking "add to my home screen"? Which is how PWAs work. They are great on Android, but iphone has deliberately not supported the standard.

> faster to use

Citation needed.

> Big Tech invest humongous amount of money in promoting those apps

Again, apple doesn't support the web, so companies that want to leverage web capabilities are forced to develop native apple apps.

But I guess that's the whole point of the discussion :)

It might be true that it’s not competitive but no evidence that it’s deliberate.

Because browsers allow remote code execution and Apple wants to limit the attack surface.

This is about gullible users being protected from attackers by Apple.

This developer-dictated "defaults" strategy is developer-friendly but user-hostile; it's why we end up with power users commenting on HN along the lines of "I can't turn off X, because then all sites will break." Most users (non-power users) cannot even turn off X because they do not even know they can. They haven't got a clue. Developers like it this way. This is some highly manipulative maneuvering; this is unethical IMO, but I think like a user not a developer.

Defaults are definitive. Perhaps that's why the current CEO of Google, before he became CEO, worked so intently to get vendors to make Google the "default search engine". Users do not change these defaults.

You disable JS, you make most websites unusable out of the box. You don't even need to go that far; disable web fonts and half the websites' buttons become undecipherable.

Technically those might be options, but in reality you have no other choice if you want to use the web.

Imagine a technology where I can test my page on one browser and be confident it looks right everywhere, not because the browser has market dominance, but because all the hard work of targeting the lowest common denominator has already been done for me. When was the last time you thought "hmm I better check and make sure this markdown document renders correctly in safari"? I think this is where the world is heading, and it's why so many sites are supporting markdown syntax. But there are so many markdown flavors and engines that we've just pushed the problem to a different level of the tech stack. But I think the concept is sound, even if the technology is still evolving toward that ideal.

If you use today’s jQuery to build out some functionality today, it will likely work exactly the same for every browser since IE10.

For many sites it is not an option. If you disable JavaScript then it does not render at all. I've also run across web sites that do not work at all if cookies are blocked.

IMHO this kind of design is just retarded. If you want certain functionality dependent on those features being active, I can understand that. But them being disabled should not prevent the web server from sending me HTML and CSS so something renders on my screen.

I know this is HN, and there are a lot of people here who are resistant to social change, but please don't use this word

This is already the case, isn't it? You can easily disable js for good, and then enable it as needed on a per-site basis.

> "I want web sites to do everything a native app can do" is a suicidal mistake.

Most Mac users are just using MacOS as a windowing system to run Chromes browser engines multiple times across the bunch of Electron apps they use to do their work.

The age where Mac users were mostly working all day in native Cocoa apps is long dead, I think I might be the only person in my office that uses a text editor running on Cocoa not Chrome.

We didn't get here by accident, end of the day Figma is better than Sketch, Google Docs is better than passing Pages files around, Google Maps in a browser window where your actual research is happening is better than opening the Apple Maps app and Slack is better for work than Messages.

The world moved forward, Jeff might not like which tech stack it chose but no one is making anything written "natively" on Macs that can compete, and it's silly to say that it shouldn't exist while that fact is true.

Also folks who want js go away web sites dont realize how massive the ecosystem is. How many unicorns are SaaS vs Native? You are asking them to go out of business?

There’s nothing that says “as an end user I’ll always prefer electron” - I don’t care what it’s written in. But from my perspective there seems to be a lot of high quality electron software that may not have existed otherwise.

But it's users who are creating these business reasons. Many people, myself included, simply don't experience native software as universally superior as platform purists would have it. So we're not paying for it.

And no you can't simply blame employers either. They may not care much about what their employees find more convenient or more beautiful, but they sure care about productivity and TCO.

Resource constraints are not a capitalist conspiracy. Free software suffers from the same issues and trade-offs between implementing actual features and re-writing software for six different platforms and UI technologies.

A choice free of any and all resource constraints cannot exist.

The browser is inherently more locked down than native apps. A Facebook app on your computer can read anything on it without any pesky browser security and privacy features getting in the way.

This is not true, at least on OSX.

It will ask the user to confirm whether the app is allowed to read/write to key locations e.g. Documents, Photos as well as access key sources of data e.g. Contacts.

true this. day before yesterday, i had a webapp ask camera and mic permission and after giving yes to both got a third dialog immediately - i read it but gave yes accidentally before realizing it was permission for push notification -

such a dark patterns can be used for exploiting users.

It doesn't matter what you say you support if the consequences of what you do hurts that goal.

MacOS and iOS apps will need to be written in Swift, so you better hope all devs know Swift and have Macs to write code in.

Windows Apps will need to be written in... uh, C#? Good like finding as many devs for that as there are currently for JS.

Nevermind that this results in a system that is completely impossible to reason about, that this allows companies and corporations to play out business politics right on your hardware and that now suddenly apps can be taken over by malicious parties.

Suddenly, we need a privileged "app store" 3rd party that can constantly monitor apps and ban them, should they suddenly turn into malware.

That is suicidal.

Yes. But some day you may need Apple's approval for Apple's user to visit your website due to security / privacy / or other ideology them deem unfit for their user's consumption.