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We have (or had) that. Chrome is removing web app support (the Apps button on your favorites bar). Firefox removed their app support after FxOS died. Nobody wa

We have (or had) that. Chrome is removing web app support (the Apps button on your favorites bar). Firefox removed their app support after FxOS died. Nobody wanted these things. Users didn't understand the idea. The APIs were clumsy. The framing of the apps added little value over a traditional web app. Portability was a joke. The best thing to happen to the web is service workers and the new world of "offline" APIs, like the push notification API. They allow pages to get the goodness of a desktop app without the downsides of installing a "native" app. (source: I helped build the Firefox Marketplace)

zaphar 10y ago
Those are more of an app store and less of a package manager. Apt and Yum solve a problem users don't know they have. The app stores solve the problem of obtaining and installing the application. They don't solve the problem of managing shared libraries and quickly updating those shared libraries. For an application like VLC this sort of thing become really important. More important than your typical email client or document editor.
- bastawhiz 10y ago
  On the web though, you don't need the user to manage libraries. In the same way you don't install a web page, libraries are simple script tags pointing at URLs. Pages will never reference incompatible versions. Browser caching makes "sharing" of libraries transparent. What's there left to manage?
  - zaphar 10y ago
    Is this still true for an application like VLC compiling to WebAssembly that uses other downstream libraries? What if VLC uses downstream libx and Audacity also uses downstream libx and downstream libx has a critical 0day. I'm not super clear yet on how the WebAssembly build pipelines works. Is dynamic linking done through script tags? or are the binary blobs statically compiled? I'm genuinely curious here how this is all supposed to work. How does one ensure that downstream libx is updated for all of the WebAssembly applications that use them.

zaphar 10y ago

Those are more of an app store and less of a package manager. Apt and Yum solve a problem users don't know they have. The app stores solve the problem of obtaining and installing the application. They don't solve the problem of managing shared libraries and quickly updating those shared libraries. For an application like VLC this sort of thing become really important. More important than your typical email client or document editor.

bastawhiz 10y ago
On the web though, you don't need the user to manage libraries. In the same way you don't install a web page, libraries are simple script tags pointing at URLs. Pages will never reference incompatible versions. Browser caching makes "sharing" of libraries transparent. What's there left to manage?
- zaphar 10y ago
  Is this still true for an application like VLC compiling to WebAssembly that uses other downstream libraries? What if VLC uses downstream libx and Audacity also uses downstream libx and downstream libx has a critical 0day. I'm not super clear yet on how the WebAssembly build pipelines works. Is dynamic linking done through script tags? or are the binary blobs statically compiled? I'm genuinely curious here how this is all supposed to work. How does one ensure that downstream libx is updated for all of the WebAssembly applications that use them.