Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty new to tech, and young in general, but I'm curious why what's happening between the different browsers regarding working together to identically implement JavaScript, thus allowing tons of modern applications to be universal across machines as long as you can install a modern browser, not happen before with other programming languages? Or did they?

I don't know anything about desktop application development, but for example in college I would use PowerPoint a lot. Was there some specific limitation that made for PowerPoint to be a Windows only thing? Was it that Microsoft just refused to make it for different operating systems? Or was there no point because everyone had windows installed anyway?

I'm kinda just chewing the fat here but in 2018 with iOS, osx, Android, windows, and Ubuntu being the main operating systems of machines, why'd it take the second level of abstraction of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Edge working together to make sharing apps across machines a thing? Like, why didn't, I dunno, some cross platform python library (I know nothing about desktop apps sorry) instead be The Universalizer?

I think that was basically C, and POSIX. Except Microsoft wasn't particularly interested in it, and they thought they'd be better off if they didn't make their software work for competing OS's.

In a sense, most programs today are really portable. I think in the past, there was a far greater variety of machines, and people used to make programs for them specifically, in assembly, that absolutely wouldn't run on even a different generation of the same familly of machines.

This is exactly what Java was; you could run GUI apps on every platform and they'd work (and look) exactly the same.

The problem is, though, that every platform is actually different -- look and feel, UI conventions, feature-set, integration, etc. And Java solved this problem by introducing their own look and feel, UI conventions, etc that were completely different from the underlying platform. Sun wanted you to know that you were using a Java application. Users, on the other hand, were not too thrilled with this -- they wanted consistency across applications. Microsoft and Apple weren't too happy with another company trying to paper-over their entire platform so they didn't offer any help either.

The other problem was performance. Especially in those days, abstracting over the entire platform was pretty computationally expensive. Furthermore, since Java didn't render anything with the native UI it also didn't get much rendering help from the OS either.

> the different browsers regarding working together to identically implement JavaScript

They didn't work together; they simply copied features from each other in order to maintain compatibility with "the web". Netscape invented JavaScript. Microsoft copied it and added some features. Netscape copied those features and added some more. Microsoft repeated that. All the browser makers have written some code or API that never copied by everyone else.

It was really not that long ago that the standard process was formed and browser makers actually started working together.

It's not really the web browser that enabled it. Web browsers have been around for a very very long time.

Instead, it's two big recent changes:

1. The relative ease at which application developers can build globally scalable infrastructure via Cloud PaaS.

2. More computers can depend on always-connected internet access.

Also worth mentioning:

Users also had a strong preference for apps that performed like native apps, which made using cross-platform toolkits less appealing (still exists when building mobile apps).

Apple Mac's didn't switch over from power pc to x86 until ~2006, which meant only large companies could support code bases for both, Windows and OSX.

Linux had a number of competing distributions, and expertise on how to deliver linux software to customers wasn't common knowledge.

This is what Java was meant to be. You just compile for the JVM and run anywhere. Also slight nit but Powerpoint is on Mac as well and has been for decades. It actually was initially a mac program and was acquired by microsoft and has been released for both all this time. and most office products have also been on mac for decades

Microsoft has always supported the Mac. It was an early Developer for the Mac in ‘84. PowerPoint was running on the Mac early on.

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