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Comment by enneff | Hacker News Reader

> By contrast, the DOM may have any number of properties twiddled at any time, and the layout engine is forced to deal with that. A random float or something could cause hundreds and thousands of nodes to reflow.

So the problem is that DOM is a bad abstraction for building GUIs, as it is necessarily inefficient.

Desktop apps have been more efficient than web apps forever. The reason is that desktop GUI toolkits were, y'know, actually designed to be GUI toolkits.

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Inefficient != bad.

Frankly, I think that the design tools and document model for the web knocks the stuffing out of any native apps, especially if you are trying to make something work quickly or on multiple platforms. I'd take CSS over Qt any day.

Amen. It's like people think the existence of a facade undermines the merit of the underlying architecture. There is no "moving too fast". If you're looking for a curated set of panacea tech then get off the frontier and wait for it to be a class. The people designing what will eventually be its content need a place to iterate. If you're butthurt about the web dominating app distribution you can use emscripten and canvas or circumvent the web entirely and use steam. The highest level interfaces of the web aren't trying to be everything for everyone. They're just standardized solutions to common problems. Look at how lodash improved performance relative to native browser methods by implementing only a useful subset of their behavior. It's not all or nothing.

I don't care about application development personally (although I'm sad that the dominant programming environments are much worse than they were 20 years ago), but I do care about the performance of the applications that I use every day. When you consider what my browser actually does it uses a tremendous amount of resources. Computers are so fast but yet most applications feel slower than the ones I used on my 100MHz Pentium in the 90s. That's broken.

They were developed with significantly less effort than applications from the 90s. Many are just experiments someone published after mere hours of work. A large number of people exist who would trade performance for more content. That's not broken it's just a difference in preference. There are high performance webapps you can use, albeit fewer of them. That and higher performance apps if you don't mind waiting to download and install.

I'd love to have the dynamism of the web and the performance of native all on one platform. We're not there yet.

The web apps I'm talking about are best-of-breed; not just some random crap on a web site somewhere. They're still slower than what I was using on Windows 95.

I also disagree that app development was harder back then. Back then we had IDEs that included online help and APIs that were actually _designed_. It wasn't a perfect world but it was at least coherent.

You're gonna need to list some examples of both, 'cause you kinda sound like a crank here.

Also, I don't really get what you're complaining about in terms of IDEs or API design here--go spend some time on the Mozilla Developer Network and come back and tell me it's just slapdash and thoughtless work.

I didn't say that it was slapdash our thoughtless; don't put those words into my mouth. It is truly admirable the great effort that people at Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft have put into improving the web.

What I'm saying is that if you sat down to design a nice cross-platform, distributed environment for building applications it would not look like the web.

To paraphrase: If you sat down to build something other than the web you wouldn't end up with the web.

Computers are so fast but yet most applications feel slower than the ones I used on my 100MHz Pentium in the 90s. That's broken.

How many multiple-megabyte images could you display in 24-bit color at 1080p on that Pentium while scrolling? How good was the support for Unicode and non-English languages? How many streaming videos and ads could you see at one time? When you downloaded kilobytes of markup, and in turn request a dozen more things from a server on the other side of the planet, how long exactly did it take to parse and load? How many times did you chat with people and embed pictures in your conversation, while listening to streaming internet radio?

Hint: computers are actually doing quite a bit more in apps these days than they used to, and its only through the good luck of hiding this fact most of the time that you can make such silly complaints.

Computers are close to two orders of magnitude faster than they were 20 years ago. It would be shocking if the stuff you mention wasn't possible.

But it's a silly complaint that some web apps can't keep up with my typing? Please.

There are many websites. Frankly, it is silly. It should be obvious that ∃site∈internet.slow(site) is true and further that it's boring.

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