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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

What about those weirdos who deliberately choose to use the abomination that the web stack is for desktop apps? To me it feels like they're trying to write real GUI apps in Word macros. I don't think I'll ever understand why.

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The reason is there is an explosion of platforms to support. Back in the '90s, "windows desktop only" was a reasonable business plan.

Now? You need Windows desktop, mobile on 2 different operating systems, web, MacOS, and possibly TV depending on your market.

What's the lowest common denominator? Web stack.

There's also Qt :)

Or Java

Or... and I know this is just crazy-talk... there is properly separating your platform-independent business logic from the minimal platform-specific UI layer. A lost art these days it seems.

If CorelDRAW were installed on every phone and given same privileges, they’d use that. A new type of browser is like a social network – relatively easy to build one, insanely hard to get it adopted by everyone. The alternative is building for at least 4 different platforms, whose common denomination is usually either a non-barking dog or a vendor-locked monstrosity not even worth considering. And existing web browsers and committees are digging their heels in the status quo.

I've met plenty of people that prefer to write GUIs in Excel macros. If all you know about is a hammer...

I only have a problem with the ones among those hammer only people that are proud of not knowing anything else and proclaim everybody not using a hammer for everything stupid, because "look on all those perfected hammers we created! your choice doesn't have such nice ones".

Oh yeah, I've seen that before. Someone made a random password generator GUI in excel for people to use at one of my previous jobs

In some ways I can I understand it, because if you want to deploy a GUI application which mostly consists of text and pictures across multiple platforms, this is probably most viable option in a lot of cases, but the fact that this is the case is a failure of the market and the industry

Yep. Native software development houses never invested enough in making a cross platform app toolkit as good as the web. There’s no technical reason why we don’t have something like electron, but lightweight and without javascript. But native-feeling cross platform UI is really hard (like $100M+ hard) and no individual company cares enough to make it happen. I’m sure it would be a great investment for the industry as a whole, but every actor with the resources is incentivised to solve their problems using different approaches. It’s pretty disappointing.

I don't think it's at all possible to make cross-platform GUIs that feel native. It's of course fine to share the core of your application across platforms, but you have to make the UI part separately for each platform for a truly nice result. There's no escaping that. And it's not like companies like Slack and Discord lack the resources to do so — they absolutely deliberately continue stubbornly ignoring the fact that, setting aside excessive resource usage, no one likes UIs that look and feel out of place in their OS. They totally have the resources necessary to rewrite their apps to use native UI toolkits on all supported systems.

I don't know engineers from in there but I am willing to bet $100 that part of them really want to make native OS UIs. It's just that business will never green-light that as a priority.

Although I'm not a huge fan of it, you could argue that Flutter is trying to solve this problem in some ways and has the right backing to be able to pull it off. It unfortunately doesn't feel native though (apart from on Android).

Qt and wxWidgets are still out there. But big money is flowing through the web, so web technologies spread with it.

Qt still feels not quite right on macOS — because it draws the controls itself instead of using the native ones. wxWidgets is the best of the bunch, because it apparently does wrap AppKit into itself, but then again, the layouts apps use give away that it's a cross-platform thing.

Because it works everywhere.

* As long as everywhere is a recent device that can run the latest version of an "evergreen" web browser

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