Comment by metachor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metachor | Hacker News Reader

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When the iPhone came out, I distinctly remember Apple saying that web apps were the future and the iPhone with mobile Safari was ready to bring that future now.

Flash-forward after a year of developers crying to write native apps, and the iPhone SDK and App Store were born, to give the developers what they asked for. It turns out there are political limitations to writing native apps for the App Store... so now those same devs are finding the bed they wanted a bit uncomfortable to sleep in, and blame Apple who wanted them to write web apps in the first place.

I really don't see this "locked-down future" that people whinge about. Apple is still leading the open web app platform charge with WebKit, which powers both Safari and Chrome, as well as their work evangelizing HTML5 technologies to the general public.

I distinctly remember Apple saying that web apps were the future and the iPhone with mobile Safari was ready to bring that future now.

It wasn't, and still isn't. There are and will always be large classes of apps for which Javascript in a browser isn't a reasonable approach.

It turns out there are political limitations to writing native apps for the App Store... so now those same devs are finding the bed they wanted a bit uncomfortable to sleep in, and blame Apple who wanted them to write web apps in the first place.

I think what Apple originally wanted was a pure console model. They and hand-picked partners would get to write native apps, and everybody else would make do with web apps.

There are and will always be large classes of apps for which Javascript in a browser isn't a reasonable approach.

Why wouldn't JavaScript and browsers continue to evolve until that isn't the case?

Clearly they will, assuming you are willing to wait a few generations of hardware for them to become powerful enough.

I think there's now a Javascript port of Quake 2 that's just about playable on a modern PC. That game's 13 years old.

i speculate this particular case is done entirely in software.

And when it launched, Quake 2 supported software rendering at fairly respectable framerates.

My point is that for applications that requires any degree of processor power javascript will struggle to match native hardware that's many generations old.

processing power isn't the point; the browsers must/may evolve to expose hardware features.

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