Hacker News Reader

Comment by shingen | Hacker News Reader

Almost 20 years and running, I don't know if I'd go with that whole transitional part.

We could change its name as specs evolve, but the idea of (and demand for) an information browser will remain so long as humans find it desirable to not personally decipher the code for each page or application.

Hop into the iTunes Store - you're suddenly in an 'information browser.' As a general consumer, whether you're looking at information on the web or some other platform, you will be using a browser of some sort. A web browser just happens to be for the web, and that isn't going anywhere any time soon. The curve to change mass consumer behavior is extremely high once you've deployed a billion versions of a software concept and people find it comfortable and effective to use.

View on HN

Sure, but the current obsession with turning it into a complete application development platform that implements 9/10ths of an operating system may turn out to be transitory.

Personally I'd much rather have something that's secure and stable and lightweight that does a few things well than a CPU-burning Javascript goliath, riddled with security holes and providing a least-common-denominator experience on every platform. Sites like HN show that the web doesn't have to be glitzy to be useful.

They're only turning into operating systems because the operating system vendors, all of them, have gotten "deployment" completely and utterly wrong, and the web has got it halfway right. It's not that the web is massively good at deployment, it's just that everyone else is so bad at it that the web wins despite being worse as an app dev platform in almost every other aspect.

This is what the web does right that OS's get wrong: cross-platform development without any vendor lock-in (not even dev tools lock-in), no installation required before using an app, no permission grants required before using an app, implicitly up-to-date without restarting the app (every click has the potential to load an updated feature), highly granular downloading of features on-demand (downloading the behavior behind every click as you are working, which is crazy when you think about it), and secure and reliable distributed computing. The only thing it gets wrong is offline support (HTML5 appcache doesn't cut it).

So, right now as a developer you can build your apps on a platform that gets deployment right (the web), or one that gets app development right (native). Someone will build a technology that combines those benefits, and people will use that instead of HTML/CSS/JS to build applications. I'm looking forward to that.

I would have cited Craigslist rather than HN for the mass appeal factor, but even there I don't agree.

Glitz sells.

If web standards don't evolve and support increasingly advanced design and interactivity then we're pushing people straight into the arms of the App Store and its ilk.

That's not to say there isn't a line between advanced functionality and bloat. Ideally dead simple like HN should utilize minimal overhead.

The thing that bothers me about web development is that in order to get all that glitz and glam, you end up writing an application that practically mirrors a native application. At that stage, what have you really gained? A relatively slow and limited VM, often lesser development tools, but a really great distribution model.

I am constantly impressed by the boundaries people are pushing with the browser. Just the other day I read about someone releasing a cell phone tethering application that runs in the browser. That is amazing, but also ridiculous, in my mind, that it is useful beyond anything more than an academic exercise.

The web browser should be another network application, not the platform for network applications. I feel we could do so much better.

We've been hearing this lament from GUI developers for a long time. App development on the web is an abuse of HTML and HTTP and that it's a huge step backwards even from decades-old GUI toolkits.

The problem with that line of thinking is that GUI toolkits will never be cross-platform and cross-medium in the way the web is. It's not like there haven't been attempts, but they are all half-baked because there is no incentive for platforms to support them. The web on the other hand is must-have for every device. This momentum is what gives web app technology real legs.

It's really a textbook example of how worse-is-better can be disruptive, and how what we end up with has no correlation to what any one individual thinks is best. It doesn't really how much better an idea someone can come up with, the question is what can the industry be mobilized to get behind.

What you can gain is a central point of deployment, delivery and updates reachable by all platforms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com