6 ms·

Is the web dying? The state of affairs in 2016

46 points by luisvieira_gmr 10y ago

PaulHoule 10y ago
I hear this message a lot from the press but I don't believe it. Have you actually used a mobile app? I agree mobile apps let you use the gyroscope and things like that, but for reading content, at least on a tablet, the ordering is real web site >> mobile web site >> app For instance I went to the imgur site, it told me to download the app, then i could not find the content I was looking at on the site.
- christogreeff 10y ago
  Consuming content from the same site, on different devices is flawed. When I know a site, and go to mobile site the experience differs so much sometimes, that it might as well be a different site. In my perception, the reason is that someone else decides what is important to me, on the smaller format.
  - tenkabuto 10y ago
    I think that your issue is moreso that the site doesn't have consistent prioritization of certain types of content. This presents an interesting issue regarding prioritization and expectations: on the Desktop view, both a central content column and a side bar (say, off to the right) are visible above the fold; the central column has a higher prioritization than the side bar. One might think, then, that for mobile views the side bar should be put beneath the central column, as it has lower a prioritization. But if you do that, you push content that is above the fold on Desktop view to below the fold on mobile, which goes against expectations that you may have set in the user's mind when they use Desktop view. Might you truncate the content column (assuming it's an article) and provide a Read More button to fit in some contents of the side bar above the fold?
franze 10y ago
No.
T-A 10y ago
TLDR: Total time spent on desktop web was up 16% from June 2013 to June 2015; on mobile web it was up 53%. So, no.
chasing 10y ago
"Is the web dying?" First chart: "Desktop" (which I assume means "desktop browsers"): Up 15%, 2013-2015. "Mobile Browser": Up 53%, 2013-2015. So: No?
- johansch 10y ago
  Mobile apps: +90%
  - venomsnake 10y ago
    Of course 90+ of those is messengers/facebook/twitter/instagram.
    - walterbell 10y ago
      Does discovery of new apps take place via web/search or social media? App Store discovery is not great.
  - fzzzy 10y ago
    Citation needed.
    - johansch 10y ago
      :-) Ok, I will give you a source: please look at this article's url. That is it!
- artifaxx 10y ago
  Perception is interesting, in this case some people perceive technology relativistically. If the technology isn't growing faster than its competition then it is dying. The author is a web developer after all.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    This is not limited to tech. It seems to permeate the financial world. If the curve is not showing growth, or perhaps even growing growth (figure that one out...), then it is time for the rats to jump overboard...
christogreeff 10y ago
Is it just me who finds the big blocks of links, throughout the article, quite distracting?
- nailer 10y ago
  Not just you. Most articles would just have a link that refers to 'Apple's announcement of the iPad Pro' rather than an excerpt and a thumbnail of an iPad pro. Medium normally has a pleasant reading experience, this wasn't.
prof_hobart 10y ago
For me, mobile web and native app are largely solving two different use cases. If it's one of the handful of places that I use regularly, and want frequent quick access to, it's probably going to be an app. I use apps for my main news sites, for my bus timetable, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc. If it's an occasional visit it's going to be the web. I'm not going to be downloading dedicated apps just to browse a forum that I've been to a couple of times ever, if I'm just trying to check prices across a whole bunch of shops or if I'm trying to get the opening time of a restaurant. There are a few that fall into the middle ground of visiting every now and then. But for the vast majority of the time there's a pretty clear web/app split, at least for me.
- berns 10y ago
  That's why progressive web apps are so interesting. It's only after you visit a site a couple of times that the banner to add to home screen appears. And you don't have to download a whole app, just the app shell. If you visit a site sporadically, you are not bothered by the constant updates that you suffer with native apps.
  - wvenable 10y ago
    Is updates a bother? If I didn't get notified (and you can turn that off) I'd never know if my apps were updated. A lot of commentary tries too hard to invent problems with native apps to level the field with web app applications.
    - JohnDotAwesome 10y ago
      > A lot of commentary tries too hard to invent problems with native apps to level the field with web app applications. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but... > Is updates a bother? Yeah, kind of. Maybe just because I'm slow to update (my OS and my apps), but every couple of months, my apps break because I need to update (app devs apparently don't care about breaking older versions of their apps with API updates). On my iPhone5, I'll open an app (say, Facebook or Lyft), it starts up and then immediately crashes. This is how I know an update is available. I download the update, and yay, I can use the app again.
sktrdie 10y ago
Native apps and Web apps are essentially the same thing. They're both running inside a sandbox environment (be it the OS or the browser). The real difference is that the Web sandbox is more constrained. Other than that (and yes I'm looking at you people who think URIs are the coming of jesus), there's really no difference between the two. Inevitably the platform which has less constraints will win.
- PaulHoule 10y ago
  One person's "constraint" is another person's freedom. That is, having to make a separate app for Android and for iOS, not to mind having to deal with whatever BS the app store puts you with, etc...
- philippnagel 10y ago
  There is another difference. Imagine a world where websites have to be approved by the browser vendor in order to be loadable. That's a constraint of native apps.
  - sktrdie 10y ago
    Meh, on the Web you're still constrained by DNS... governments can shutdown specific sites.
    - Tiquor 10y ago
      What an odd comparison.
    - dasil003 10y ago
      Doesn't really merit the "Meh" unless you think all world governments coordinating their censorship is as likely as Apple rejecting your app.
    - philippnagel 10y ago
      That can happen to your native app as well if it requires network access.
IshKebab 10y ago
Mobile websites were never very good. Websites either don't have one, or they have a cut down one that doesn't let you see the full site (e.g. the HSBC mobile site only lets you check balances - wtf?). Combine that with huge cookie warnings and ads that take up most of the screen and you end up with a pretty bad experience.
- phee 10y ago
  Add slow loading... not really bad by itself but terrible when the partially loaded pages constantly move and rearrange as new elements are ready.
  - k__ 10y ago
    Technically this is a solved problem, but somehow no one cares enough. Bad people would say, companies make them bad on purpose, so people get apps and can be tracked better.
nailer 10y ago
As of a month ago, we (as in the web) have finally got window.payment on the way (or whatever Apple and Google's different payment APIs are actually implemented as). I'm happy.
plugnburn 10y ago
Is the web dying? Only in red-eyed-hipstazz dreams.
greenspot 10y ago
It's not dying but it's a saturated market where almost every problem has been solved in the past 20 years.
dasil003 10y ago
I don't see much competition between apps and the web, they have very different use cases and evolution characteristics. The web will never be able to compete with an app SDK for performance, OS integration, and ease of development. But on the other hand, no app SDK will ever be able to target all platforms the way the web can as a defacto standard which all vendors must implement to be considered a general purpose computing device. I see the web as a sort of unstoppable blob of a standard which moves forward slowly, but is constantly growing in use cases. No vendor or even a consortium has the power to supplant it. The only thing that would kill the web is something which makes it irrelevant, but apps will not be that thing, it will be some other force or trend which we aren't really seeing yet.
- bobajeff 10y ago
  I think it can get close to competing with a native SDK in performance. With WebGL2, SIMD.js, JavaScript shared memory threads and WebAssembly it could get close enough that few will care about the difference. I think ease of development really depends on the developer and tools. I can't speak for OS integration as it has never interested me to a great extent as a user. I'm sure some users care but I don't.
  - rimantas 10y ago
    Anyone making such claims usually has no idea what native SDK are capable of.
    - bobajeff 10y ago
      I admit that I don't know what I'm talking about. Care to enlighten me on what native SDK's are capable of?
      - dasil003 10y ago
        Controlling audio by headset, background processing, serverless data syncing, register capabilities to make the app auto-open for a specific intent, direct connection to the hardware capabilities, etc, etc. Note that it's not impossible for these things to exist for the web, but by virtue of how these products and standards are developed, web standards will never catch up unless Apple and Google somehow decided that web standards were the way forward and to nerf their native SDK development efforts.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
The internet is dying. It is becoming ever harder to do anything outside of port 80.
- dingaling 10y ago
  I have literally just encountered this using free hospital WiFi. Ports 80 and 443 open but ssh, SMTP and IMAP are all silently dropped. Workaround is to tunnel those over 80 which in turn reinforces the dominance of web ports.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    ISP blocking of port 25 significantly curtails the spam problem. Imagine if every subscriber could connect to any SMTP server in the world and send an e-mail. I agree that too aggressive port blocking is a problem, though.
runewell 10y ago
It depends what you consider "the web" to be at this point. If you consider domain names, web server software, and data formats / protocols created for the web to be part of "the web" then I would argue that nearly all of the mobile apps use "the web" in some capacity. If you're referring to only browser-accessible web properties then I would say it's increasing at an incredible pace, just not as incredible a pace as mobile. Mobile is king right now but it's hard to predict the future, perhaps Augmented Reality takes over, or perhaps mobile is the first to enter emerging markets but as the cost and size of computers decrease we may see an eventual surge in desktop machines with web browser access. I look at the web as the "safe zone" or default last-resort method of accessing the Internet. I don't think it will go away anytime soon until we have a superior alternative that provides the convenience, efficiency, and level of open access to information that we see today.
sotojuan 10y ago
Mobile web can be just as good as apps for a lot of (not all) use cases but only if people put enough effort into them like say, Google does with their PWA initiative. Anything less than that and apps win.
- rimantas 10y ago
  Mobile web can be as good (or better) in just one case—reading the content.
ProxCoques 10y ago
I don't know if it's just me having a bad day, but I can hardly concentrate on what this guy is saying due to his over-use of commas. Anyone else, find these commas, distracting and, weird?
- hartator 10y ago
  I've gave up for different reason, I felt everything was copy/pasted in a hurry.
- kazinator 10y ago
  Those are run-on sentences of the "comma splice" variety. This could be a non-native English writer, coming from a language in whose written conventions (orthography), independent clauses can be correctly joined by a comma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice
kazinator 10y ago
> these days native apps seem to consistently provide better experiences than their web counterparts, with better performance, smoother animations, and fully integrated with the device OS. These days? When have native apps not had these properties?
simbalion 10y ago
Apps are a fad. Mobile devices are heavy and people will get sick of their novelty, as people do with all new toys after awhile. Many of us probably understand this as we were using mobile devices long before the iphone existed. In contrast, "the web" or something like it, will exist forever.
anotheryou 10y ago
Worth mentioning is, that so far we remain free to build alternative niches (even though they will have a hard time to become mainstream). Net neutrality remains especially important for that.
pjdorrell 10y ago
One group of people will always want to access the open web on a large screen via a web browser running on a general purpose computer: software developers. If the web "dies", then the non-web will also die, or at least it won't be very healthy, because the developers won't have the infrastructure they need to efficiently develop the required non-web software.

I hear this message a lot from the press but I don't believe it. Have you actually used a mobile app? I agree mobile apps let you use the gyroscope and things like that, but for reading content, at least on a tablet, the ordering is real web site >> mobile web site >> app For instance I went to the imgur site, it told me to download the app, then i could not find the content I was looking at on the site.

christogreeff 10y ago
Consuming content from the same site, on different devices is flawed. When I know a site, and go to mobile site the experience differs so much sometimes, that it might as well be a different site. In my perception, the reason is that someone else decides what is important to me, on the smaller format.
- tenkabuto 10y ago
  I think that your issue is moreso that the site doesn't have consistent prioritization of certain types of content. This presents an interesting issue regarding prioritization and expectations: on the Desktop view, both a central content column and a side bar (say, off to the right) are visible above the fold; the central column has a higher prioritization than the side bar. One might think, then, that for mobile views the side bar should be put beneath the central column, as it has lower a prioritization. But if you do that, you push content that is above the fold on Desktop view to below the fold on mobile, which goes against expectations that you may have set in the user's mind when they use Desktop view. Might you truncate the content column (assuming it's an article) and provide a Read More button to fit in some contents of the side bar above the fold?

franze 10y ago

No.

T-A 10y ago

TLDR: Total time spent on desktop web was up 16% from June 2013 to June 2015; on mobile web it was up 53%. So, no.

chasing 10y ago

"Is the web dying?" First chart: "Desktop" (which I assume means "desktop browsers"): Up 15%, 2013-2015. "Mobile Browser": Up 53%, 2013-2015. So: No?

johansch 10y ago
Mobile apps: +90%
- venomsnake 10y ago
  Of course 90+ of those is messengers/facebook/twitter/instagram.
  - walterbell 10y ago
    Does discovery of new apps take place via web/search or social media? App Store discovery is not great.
- fzzzy 10y ago
  Citation needed.
  - johansch 10y ago
    :-) Ok, I will give you a source: please look at this article's url. That is it!
artifaxx 10y ago
Perception is interesting, in this case some people perceive technology relativistically. If the technology isn't growing faster than its competition then it is dying. The author is a web developer after all.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  This is not limited to tech. It seems to permeate the financial world. If the curve is not showing growth, or perhaps even growing growth (figure that one out...), then it is time for the rats to jump overboard...

christogreeff 10y ago

Is it just me who finds the big blocks of links, throughout the article, quite distracting?

nailer 10y ago
Not just you. Most articles would just have a link that refers to 'Apple's announcement of the iPad Pro' rather than an excerpt and a thumbnail of an iPad pro. Medium normally has a pleasant reading experience, this wasn't.

prof_hobart 10y ago

For me, mobile web and native app are largely solving two different use cases. If it's one of the handful of places that I use regularly, and want frequent quick access to, it's probably going to be an app. I use apps for my main news sites, for my bus timetable, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc. If it's an occasional visit it's going to be the web. I'm not going to be downloading dedicated apps just to browse a forum that I've been to a couple of times ever, if I'm just trying to check prices across a whole bunch of shops or if I'm trying to get the opening time of a restaurant. There are a few that fall into the middle ground of visiting every now and then. But for the vast majority of the time there's a pretty clear web/app split, at least for me.

berns 10y ago
That's why progressive web apps are so interesting. It's only after you visit a site a couple of times that the banner to add to home screen appears. And you don't have to download a whole app, just the app shell. If you visit a site sporadically, you are not bothered by the constant updates that you suffer with native apps.
- wvenable 10y ago
  Is updates a bother? If I didn't get notified (and you can turn that off) I'd never know if my apps were updated. A lot of commentary tries too hard to invent problems with native apps to level the field with web app applications.
  - JohnDotAwesome 10y ago
    > A lot of commentary tries too hard to invent problems with native apps to level the field with web app applications. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but... > Is updates a bother? Yeah, kind of. Maybe just because I'm slow to update (my OS and my apps), but every couple of months, my apps break because I need to update (app devs apparently don't care about breaking older versions of their apps with API updates). On my iPhone5, I'll open an app (say, Facebook or Lyft), it starts up and then immediately crashes. This is how I know an update is available. I download the update, and yay, I can use the app again.

sktrdie 10y ago

Native apps and Web apps are essentially the same thing. They're both running inside a sandbox environment (be it the OS or the browser). The real difference is that the Web sandbox is more constrained. Other than that (and yes I'm looking at you people who think URIs are the coming of jesus), there's really no difference between the two. Inevitably the platform which has less constraints will win.

PaulHoule 10y ago
One person's "constraint" is another person's freedom. That is, having to make a separate app for Android and for iOS, not to mind having to deal with whatever BS the app store puts you with, etc...
philippnagel 10y ago
There is another difference. Imagine a world where websites have to be approved by the browser vendor in order to be loadable. That's a constraint of native apps.
- sktrdie 10y ago
  Meh, on the Web you're still constrained by DNS... governments can shutdown specific sites.
  - Tiquor 10y ago
    What an odd comparison.
  - dasil003 10y ago
    Doesn't really merit the "Meh" unless you think all world governments coordinating their censorship is as likely as Apple rejecting your app.
  - philippnagel 10y ago
    That can happen to your native app as well if it requires network access.

IshKebab 10y ago

Mobile websites were never very good. Websites either don't have one, or they have a cut down one that doesn't let you see the full site (e.g. the HSBC mobile site only lets you check balances - wtf?). Combine that with huge cookie warnings and ads that take up most of the screen and you end up with a pretty bad experience.

phee 10y ago
Add slow loading... not really bad by itself but terrible when the partially loaded pages constantly move and rearrange as new elements are ready.
- k__ 10y ago
  Technically this is a solved problem, but somehow no one cares enough. Bad people would say, companies make them bad on purpose, so people get apps and can be tracked better.

nailer 10y ago

As of a month ago, we (as in the web) have finally got window.payment on the way (or whatever Apple and Google's different payment APIs are actually implemented as). I'm happy.

plugnburn 10y ago

Is the web dying? Only in red-eyed-hipstazz dreams.

greenspot 10y ago

It's not dying but it's a saturated market where almost every problem has been solved in the past 20 years.

dasil003 10y ago

I don't see much competition between apps and the web, they have very different use cases and evolution characteristics. The web will never be able to compete with an app SDK for performance, OS integration, and ease of development. But on the other hand, no app SDK will ever be able to target all platforms the way the web can as a defacto standard which all vendors must implement to be considered a general purpose computing device. I see the web as a sort of unstoppable blob of a standard which moves forward slowly, but is constantly growing in use cases. No vendor or even a consortium has the power to supplant it. The only thing that would kill the web is something which makes it irrelevant, but apps will not be that thing, it will be some other force or trend which we aren't really seeing yet.

bobajeff 10y ago
I think it can get close to competing with a native SDK in performance. With WebGL2, SIMD.js, JavaScript shared memory threads and WebAssembly it could get close enough that few will care about the difference. I think ease of development really depends on the developer and tools. I can't speak for OS integration as it has never interested me to a great extent as a user. I'm sure some users care but I don't.
- rimantas 10y ago
  Anyone making such claims usually has no idea what native SDK are capable of.
  - bobajeff 10y ago
    I admit that I don't know what I'm talking about. Care to enlighten me on what native SDK's are capable of?
    - dasil003 10y ago
      Controlling audio by headset, background processing, serverless data syncing, register capabilities to make the app auto-open for a specific intent, direct connection to the hardware capabilities, etc, etc. Note that it's not impossible for these things to exist for the web, but by virtue of how these products and standards are developed, web standards will never catch up unless Apple and Google somehow decided that web standards were the way forward and to nerf their native SDK development efforts.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

The internet is dying. It is becoming ever harder to do anything outside of port 80.

dingaling 10y ago
I have literally just encountered this using free hospital WiFi. Ports 80 and 443 open but ssh, SMTP and IMAP are all silently dropped. Workaround is to tunnel those over 80 which in turn reinforces the dominance of web ports.
- kazinator 10y ago
  ISP blocking of port 25 significantly curtails the spam problem. Imagine if every subscriber could connect to any SMTP server in the world and send an e-mail. I agree that too aggressive port blocking is a problem, though.

runewell 10y ago

It depends what you consider "the web" to be at this point. If you consider domain names, web server software, and data formats / protocols created for the web to be part of "the web" then I would argue that nearly all of the mobile apps use "the web" in some capacity. If you're referring to only browser-accessible web properties then I would say it's increasing at an incredible pace, just not as incredible a pace as mobile. Mobile is king right now but it's hard to predict the future, perhaps Augmented Reality takes over, or perhaps mobile is the first to enter emerging markets but as the cost and size of computers decrease we may see an eventual surge in desktop machines with web browser access. I look at the web as the "safe zone" or default last-resort method of accessing the Internet. I don't think it will go away anytime soon until we have a superior alternative that provides the convenience, efficiency, and level of open access to information that we see today.

sotojuan 10y ago

Mobile web can be just as good as apps for a lot of (not all) use cases but only if people put enough effort into them like say, Google does with their PWA initiative. Anything less than that and apps win.

rimantas 10y ago
Mobile web can be as good (or better) in just one case—reading the content.

ProxCoques 10y ago

I don't know if it's just me having a bad day, but I can hardly concentrate on what this guy is saying due to his over-use of commas. Anyone else, find these commas, distracting and, weird?

hartator 10y ago
I've gave up for different reason, I felt everything was copy/pasted in a hurry.
kazinator 10y ago
Those are run-on sentences of the "comma splice" variety. This could be a non-native English writer, coming from a language in whose written conventions (orthography), independent clauses can be correctly joined by a comma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice

kazinator 10y ago

> these days native apps seem to consistently provide better experiences than their web counterparts, with better performance, smoother animations, and fully integrated with the device OS. These days? When have native apps not had these properties?

simbalion 10y ago

Apps are a fad. Mobile devices are heavy and people will get sick of their novelty, as people do with all new toys after awhile. Many of us probably understand this as we were using mobile devices long before the iphone existed. In contrast, "the web" or something like it, will exist forever.

anotheryou 10y ago

Worth mentioning is, that so far we remain free to build alternative niches (even though they will have a hard time to become mainstream). Net neutrality remains especially important for that.

pjdorrell 10y ago

One group of people will always want to access the open web on a large screen via a web browser running on a general purpose computer: software developers. If the web "dies", then the non-web will also die, or at least it won't be very healthy, because the developers won't have the infrastructure they need to efficiently develop the required non-web software.