5 ms·

I wonder if they would have considered HTML5 if NW.js / Electron had been around when they started.

by WhitneyLand 11y ago

mahouse 11y ago
For the UI of a serious program that requires performance?
- WhitneyLand 11y ago
  What UI in the app would exceed the performance limits? You realize there is a lot of hardware acceleration available in the browser?
  - mahouse 11y ago
    When you have to draw 1000 new packets per second for example?
scrollaway 11y ago
Please stop with the HTML5 UI madness. While HTML/CSS is, imo, a great UI toolkit, nobody wants a browser engine in every separate application. A browser engine that needs to be kept up to date with upstream on an extremely regular basis, separately for every app, lest you are vulnerable to whatever exploit of the month.
- geofft 11y ago
  It's a browser engine running trusted code (i.e., code that is currently running with full privileges on your account), so the attack surface is much lower than a browser engine visiting random web pages. Wireshark won't suddenly start playing a Flash animation or use WebGL or anything. And it's not like GTK+ or Qt are immune from having security vulnerabilities. They're rarer than the general class of browser vulnerabilities, but they exist (e.g. Qt had a few image decoder vulnerabilities earlier this year). I'd guess they're about as frequent as the specific subset of browser vulnerabilities when viewing a trusted website. If it's a helpful analogy, this is roughly like how Java is a terrible platform for running untrusted applets, but a perfectly fine platform for running software and a very common one for security-sensitive servers. (Except the browsers themselves are way better than the Java plugin.)
- WhitneyLand 11y ago
  You must be joking by complaining about the need for security updates. Most apps need regular updates regardless of platform. Have you seen how often MS office or Adobe apps get security patches? Arguably the security of Chromium is better because of how widely it's used and tested.
- knodi123 11y ago
  > lest you are vulnerable to whatever exploit of the month. If you are hiding the fact that you're browsing pages random page from the web in your native UI, then you have bigger problems than the update cycle.
- zanny 11y ago
  On top of this, Qt 5 is a browser engine. Kind of. That is what QML is meant to be. Its application javascript done right, rather than the mutant horrible diaster that is web standards. If you write a full application in QML today and experience how amazingly easy it is to do fancy visual effects since the whole thing is hardware accelerated you will never be able to develop web app code again without desperately praying for sweet release. I dream of the day QML is standardized as webapp tech in browser standards, so we can have cross platform native applications over the browser that use a reasonable programming paradigm rather than trying to turn markup documents into mission critical applications.
  - jalfresi 11y ago
    Couldn't agree more. I've used QML for a Go app and the sanity prevalent in QML vs. web standards is like night and day. I actually don't want anything more to do with web front end development - leave all the react/flux/angular nonsense to the JS package manager of the month crowd.
    - gnufied 11y ago
      So I have used QML plenty too and it isn't all that great honestly. In fact in many ways it is backwards. For example, all Qt widgets instantiated via C++ can be styled using an external stylesheet, but not so for QML stuff. All the margin, padding you have to specify inline in the code. If that is not going backwards, I dunno what is.
      - jalfresi 11y ago
        Ah well that may be an area I've yet to encounter - I've used a third-party set of qml widgets styled to adhere to googles material visual vocab, so it has been trivial to style up applications that look and act fantastic. Though I will say that the inability to expose a go strict/object as a model is quite frustrating; there's lots of back and forth mapping your go objects to update your qml models. It would be much nicer if it was easy to implement as adhering to an interface or embedding an existing type :(
      - 11y ago
geofft 11y ago
Cloudshark is basically this, and it's very shiny. https://www.cloudshark.org/captures/184a2df0b16d https://www.cloudshark.org/captures/184a2df0b16d
jkot 11y ago
I think it throws OOME after a few million packets.

I wonder if they would have considered HTML5 if NW.js / Electron had been around when they started.

mahouse 11y ago

For the UI of a serious program that requires performance?

WhitneyLand 11y ago
What UI in the app would exceed the performance limits? You realize there is a lot of hardware acceleration available in the browser?
- mahouse 11y ago
  When you have to draw 1000 new packets per second for example?

scrollaway 11y ago

Please stop with the HTML5 UI madness. While HTML/CSS is, imo, a great UI toolkit, nobody wants a browser engine in every separate application. A browser engine that needs to be kept up to date with upstream on an extremely regular basis, separately for every app, lest you are vulnerable to whatever exploit of the month.

geofft 11y ago
It's a browser engine running trusted code (i.e., code that is currently running with full privileges on your account), so the attack surface is much lower than a browser engine visiting random web pages. Wireshark won't suddenly start playing a Flash animation or use WebGL or anything. And it's not like GTK+ or Qt are immune from having security vulnerabilities. They're rarer than the general class of browser vulnerabilities, but they exist (e.g. Qt had a few image decoder vulnerabilities earlier this year). I'd guess they're about as frequent as the specific subset of browser vulnerabilities when viewing a trusted website. If it's a helpful analogy, this is roughly like how Java is a terrible platform for running untrusted applets, but a perfectly fine platform for running software and a very common one for security-sensitive servers. (Except the browsers themselves are way better than the Java plugin.)
WhitneyLand 11y ago
You must be joking by complaining about the need for security updates. Most apps need regular updates regardless of platform. Have you seen how often MS office or Adobe apps get security patches? Arguably the security of Chromium is better because of how widely it's used and tested.
knodi123 11y ago
> lest you are vulnerable to whatever exploit of the month. If you are hiding the fact that you're browsing pages random page from the web in your native UI, then you have bigger problems than the update cycle.
zanny 11y ago
On top of this, Qt 5 is a browser engine. Kind of. That is what QML is meant to be. Its application javascript done right, rather than the mutant horrible diaster that is web standards. If you write a full application in QML today and experience how amazingly easy it is to do fancy visual effects since the whole thing is hardware accelerated you will never be able to develop web app code again without desperately praying for sweet release. I dream of the day QML is standardized as webapp tech in browser standards, so we can have cross platform native applications over the browser that use a reasonable programming paradigm rather than trying to turn markup documents into mission critical applications.
- jalfresi 11y ago
  Couldn't agree more. I've used QML for a Go app and the sanity prevalent in QML vs. web standards is like night and day. I actually don't want anything more to do with web front end development - leave all the react/flux/angular nonsense to the JS package manager of the month crowd.
  - gnufied 11y ago
    So I have used QML plenty too and it isn't all that great honestly. In fact in many ways it is backwards. For example, all Qt widgets instantiated via C++ can be styled using an external stylesheet, but not so for QML stuff. All the margin, padding you have to specify inline in the code. If that is not going backwards, I dunno what is.
    - jalfresi 11y ago
      Ah well that may be an area I've yet to encounter - I've used a third-party set of qml widgets styled to adhere to googles material visual vocab, so it has been trivial to style up applications that look and act fantastic. Though I will say that the inability to expose a go strict/object as a model is quite frustrating; there's lots of back and forth mapping your go objects to update your qml models. It would be much nicer if it was easy to implement as adhering to an interface or embedding an existing type :(
    - 11y ago

geofft 11y ago

Cloudshark is basically this, and it's very shiny. https://www.cloudshark.org/captures/184a2df0b16d https://www.cloudshark.org/captures/184a2df0b16d

jkot 11y ago

I think it throws OOME after a few million packets.