What’s your guys general thought on how everything is web based now? For me, I don’t really like it. I would just rather have an actual program that runs. But I am merely a user, not a programmer.
People don’t like downloading things unless they absolutely have to. It immediately puts a weight against anyone using what you’ve created. With web based, there’s nothing to download, and it works on any platform that can run a browser.
While at the same time, this is just a ‘perception’ thing.
The user is always downloading all the JS, just not really keeping it in a place they would look at and not having to click a “Download” button.
For a lot of things I would rather have something web based than app based. I hate having to download some random app from some random company just to interact with something one time. Why do all restaurants, car parking places etc require apps rather than just having a simple site. Not everything should be native first IMO.
Yeah there are pros and cons. Desktop apps are not sandboxed. Mobile apps are often missing features and are annoying to install. Websites often have poor performance or janky UX on mobile, and you need to be online, and you don’t have control of their availability.
I think the best option depends on what the thing is - ordering food from a random pub? Web site. Video editing? App.
I hate it. It’s useful for enterprise systems, since the people using that often need to access it from any device. Image/video/sound editing? Let me have an installed program and DON’T MAKE IT FUCKING ELECTRON. Most of the things I use don’t connect to the internet, so I’d have to self host anyway, so I’d rather have the full application rather than run a localhost server.
As someone who 3D prints as a hobby, I prefer Chitubox over Lychee because the latter is an electron app, plus they force a 30 second ad wait when you click “slice”.
I understand the convenience, but I don’t like it. All my data is on someone else’s computer, and I have to enable activity trackers for the privilege of accessing my data? Heck nah.
If the major OSs could treat a web browser instance like a separate app, I wouldn’t hate it so much. Like I want a dedicated thing on my taskbar/dock that will always take me to my google calendar. I hate having to search through browser windows (even when named) to find the right one.
I use a seperate browser for aws console to make it quicker to find.
But I do love being able to have more than one tab per app (like for aws console) which most standalone apps don’t support.
For splitting the app in the taskbar I found it useful to “install” the PWA (you got to find the hidden option in chrome for that…), if it’s supported by the website… It still uses the same cookies and addons, but at least it doesn’t easily get merged with the main browser window and behaves like a proper desktop application. I mainly use firefox though and it doesn’t support PWAs (easily, at least). It’s a shame it’s not more common, because it’s a much better way to run software than the many electron apps, each having their own chromium installation (no download, no long installation process, full sandboxing, and you can have addons & adblockers affect the pwa!)
you can create shortcuts of web addresses and it’ll open that address in your default browser
Yeah, but finding it the second time is the problem. For most things I want to get back to the part of the app I was on. Google cal is simple, so doesn’t have that issue. But aws console would. And most other apps too.
It’s cloud services, not things being web based. It’s capitalism hijacking technology and preventing you from owning anything. Figma runs in the browser and it’s a fantastic piece of software. But it’s also a cloud service that can be taken away from you at any point. But if you subtract the business model, the fact that you can run something like that in the browser is incredible. Web makes it so incredibly easy to distribute cross platform software. FOSS should embrace it and use it to build actually good software not all this SASS garbage.
