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Imitating desktop platforms has never been the strong point of web sites and web browsers. If you think of the web platform in terms of how good it is at build

Imitating desktop platforms has never been the strong point of web sites and web browsers. If you think of the web platform in terms of how good it is at building desktop applications, then you will see many valid weaknesses, but you will completely miss many important strengths. Clay Shirky makes this point better than I can: http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html Browsers have been innovating, just not where you might be looking. One type of innovation that's totally invisible from a "competing with native apps" viewpoint but really useful in terms of the web's strengths is Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). CORS has been a draft spec for a while and is now implemented by most major browsers. With CORS and other standards it's influenced (like WebSockets), a web page can send and receive data to multiple sites while still remaining in the browser's same-origin sandbox (which means users don't need to trust it any more than a regular web page). That security sandbox is a unique strength of the web; average desktop users still need to trust every application developer with complete access of their computer. This is an area where native platforms are playing catch-up to the web - iPhone and Android have finally brought this level of sandboxing to mainstream operating systems, a decade after it evolved in web browsers.

Qz 17y ago
It's not about imitating a desktop application, but about having a usable interface with one. For example: Let's say I'm one of those wackos who keeps a zillion files on my desktop. I want to upload a picture to imageshack or whatever. The way we've been forced to do this for years now is to click the browse button on the webpage, navigate to the desktop folder,and finally scroll down through a zillion files to find the one image I want to upload. Or, you could just drag the image file from the desktop to the imageshack page and it would Just Work. I realize there are apps that let you do this kind of drag and drop uploading, but that's exactly the point -- apps did this easily, so there really was absolutely no reason for it to take years for drag and drop to finally make it into HTML. Thinking in terms of desktop vs mobile is narrow-sighted. What's at stake here is pushing forward the browser (aka: web) interaction experience, regardless of platform.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  Safari has done this for as long as it has existed, since the ability is baked right into Mac OS X. Open any file dialog (or the terminal) and dropping files on it works the same as navigating (or typing) the hierarchy to that file. Sounds to me like the popular Windows desktops are the ones innovating at a snail's pace. Perhaps not coincidentally, I'd blame the same party for holding back the web.
  - Qz 17y ago
    You're right, and it's insane that you can't drag a file to the browser dialog on windows. But that doesn't make it less insane that you couldn't drag a file directly to a webpage until just recently. I don't think that it's just browsers that aren't innovating -- desktop UIs have been stale crufty shit for years. OSX may have had some improvements but it's still a lot of cruft. Ubuntu seems to be doing some interesting things recently, but that doesn't get linux off the hook for not doing interesting things earlier (and I'm speaking here about average-user-friendliness, not cool stuff for us hacker types). To be honest, I think a lot of the innovation in mobile UIs has come from the fact that it was hard/impossible to port over the old UI, so they actually had to think up something new. Touch and form-factor are just the constraints that forced people to actually think about UI. Desktop UIs could be orders of magnitude better if the OS shell teams were put in the same situation.
    - ericd 17y ago
      Keep in mind that iPhone just happened to be a breakthrough in phone UI. Windows Mobile has been around for many years before the iPhone was more than a dream in Jobs' head. It's only recently that smartphones have actually become usable and not just frustrating toys. What are these orders of magnitude you speak of on the desktop side? I don't frequently find myself wishing OS X did much differently.
      - Qz 17y ago
        The iPhone illustrates exactly what I mean -- Windows Mobile is an example of trying to port Windows (and all it's associated cruft) onto the phone. It's better than it was, but it's still pretty terrible and a lot of that has to do with its legacy. For iPhone they really sat down and thought, what actually works on a smartphone? This took a long damn time as far as I'm concerned. I have a motorola phone from 2008 and the interface is godawful and makes me want to tear things apart every time I have to navigate its unwieldly menu system. My previous phone was from 2004 -- there was almost no improvement from one to the next. As for the desktop, a lot of where I see potential is in interactivity between programs. Pretty much any time there is interactivity between programs these days it's because the application developers programmed it in, and I think there's a huge opportunity to weave application interactivity into the desktop shell itself, so that things Just Work, without everyone having to code that stuff up all the time. There's also, in my experience, a crapload of user time wasted doing menial things like window management that doesn't need to happen. Those are just a few things -- don't want to give away all my ideas...

Qz 17y ago

It's not about imitating a desktop application, but about having a usable interface with one. For example: Let's say I'm one of those wackos who keeps a zillion files on my desktop. I want to upload a picture to imageshack or whatever. The way we've been forced to do this for years now is to click the browse button on the webpage, navigate to the desktop folder,and finally scroll down through a zillion files to find the one image I want to upload. Or, you could just drag the image file from the desktop to the imageshack page and it would Just Work. I realize there are apps that let you do this kind of drag and drop uploading, but that's exactly the point -- apps did this easily, so there really was absolutely no reason for it to take years for drag and drop to finally make it into HTML. Thinking in terms of desktop vs mobile is narrow-sighted. What's at stake here is pushing forward the browser (aka: web) interaction experience, regardless of platform.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago
Safari has done this for as long as it has existed, since the ability is baked right into Mac OS X. Open any file dialog (or the terminal) and dropping files on it works the same as navigating (or typing) the hierarchy to that file. Sounds to me like the popular Windows desktops are the ones innovating at a snail's pace. Perhaps not coincidentally, I'd blame the same party for holding back the web.
- Qz 17y ago
  You're right, and it's insane that you can't drag a file to the browser dialog on windows. But that doesn't make it less insane that you couldn't drag a file directly to a webpage until just recently. I don't think that it's just browsers that aren't innovating -- desktop UIs have been stale crufty shit for years. OSX may have had some improvements but it's still a lot of cruft. Ubuntu seems to be doing some interesting things recently, but that doesn't get linux off the hook for not doing interesting things earlier (and I'm speaking here about average-user-friendliness, not cool stuff for us hacker types). To be honest, I think a lot of the innovation in mobile UIs has come from the fact that it was hard/impossible to port over the old UI, so they actually had to think up something new. Touch and form-factor are just the constraints that forced people to actually think about UI. Desktop UIs could be orders of magnitude better if the OS shell teams were put in the same situation.
  - ericd 17y ago
    Keep in mind that iPhone just happened to be a breakthrough in phone UI. Windows Mobile has been around for many years before the iPhone was more than a dream in Jobs' head. It's only recently that smartphones have actually become usable and not just frustrating toys. What are these orders of magnitude you speak of on the desktop side? I don't frequently find myself wishing OS X did much differently.
    - Qz 17y ago
      The iPhone illustrates exactly what I mean -- Windows Mobile is an example of trying to port Windows (and all it's associated cruft) onto the phone. It's better than it was, but it's still pretty terrible and a lot of that has to do with its legacy. For iPhone they really sat down and thought, what actually works on a smartphone? This took a long damn time as far as I'm concerned. I have a motorola phone from 2008 and the interface is godawful and makes me want to tear things apart every time I have to navigate its unwieldly menu system. My previous phone was from 2004 -- there was almost no improvement from one to the next. As for the desktop, a lot of where I see potential is in interactivity between programs. Pretty much any time there is interactivity between programs these days it's because the application developers programmed it in, and I think there's a huge opportunity to weave application interactivity into the desktop shell itself, so that things Just Work, without everyone having to code that stuff up all the time. There's also, in my experience, a crapload of user time wasted doing menial things like window management that doesn't need to happen. Those are just a few things -- don't want to give away all my ideas...