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I have a theory. Search is a Killer Feature. And I mean that in the most extreme and broadest way possible. The user interface paradigm of "type a bit of wha

I have a theory. Search is a Killer Feature. And I mean that in the most extreme and broadest way possible. The user interface paradigm of "type a bit of what you want, hit enter, click and immediately be using what you want" was, in hindsight, what users wanted/needed. It was so completely successful that nothing else mattered. It didn't matter that web apps are fundamentally flawed, introducing ridiculous latency on all the other simpler interactions (would you tolerate 200ms latency for a clientside application to respond to you clicking a button?), throwing away all of the work done to create and present unified user interface elements, enabled every click and action to be surveiled, profiled, and datamined, added points of failure completely outside of the users control, locking user data away in someone else's systems, etc. None of that could outweigh the gargantuan power and usability of search. Desktop OS' still aren't treating search as a first-class citizen. You still can't just search and be using a new application nearly immediately. Mobile gets close with their app stores, but there's still friction there. Even though the W3C adamantly refused to acknowledge the web as a platform for interactive applications for 2 decades, it just kept growing and more was shoehorned into their static document presentation system no matter what they did. It amazes me how difficult it still is to find an application that does what you need, download it, install it, then launch it. Unsurprisingly, even that relies upon the web to accomplish the first searching portion. I like to dream that perhaps we are approaching a sort of convergence, though. The web makes sandboxing less and less relevant as users data is all migrated into remote services (protecting your data is what sandboxing was FOR, right?) while desktop OS are making clientside sandboxing and containers easier and easier. Technology never fails to be interesting to watch while it develops alongside us.

dahfizz 7y ago
I don't think this is true at all. In fact, I have a hard time believing users actually prefer the web over native apps at all. As you say, web apps are pretty terrible. They will never be as fast or reliable as native apps. > You still can't just search and be using a new application nearly immediately. You can't? I sure can. Gnome, kde, and Mac all have great ways of searching through your apps. The windows search is a little crap. But the great thing about a local, native environment is that the user is actually in control. If there is an app I need quick access to, I can map it to a shortcut or desktop icon. That's way faster that searching and scrolling through results. From my non web dev perspective, the reason there is such a proliferation of bloated web apps is because of the devs. All of a sudden we have a ton of developers with little to no formal training who want to make cool apps instead of good products. So they layer on plenty of dependencies. And when there's a Cool New Framework© next week, they'll incorporate that too. I just don't think devs have performance and user experience as number one priorities. The web will always be horribly slow compared to an SSD. In my opinion, the web has a couple of other fatal flaws that make it inferior to native for applications. But if we do want the web to be where all our applications to live anyway, we need to be concerned about performance as a high priority.
- y4mi 7y ago
  > You can't? I sure can. Gnome, kde, and Mac all have great ways of searching through your apps He was talking about using new apps, not already installed ones. And the Windows search works fine as long as you disable Cortana... As sad as that is.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
> type a bit of what you want, hit enter, click and immediately be using what you want This is a nice idea, but it’s far faster to search with mail.app. The great thing about gmail is just labels.

dahfizz 7y ago

I don't think this is true at all. In fact, I have a hard time believing users actually prefer the web over native apps at all. As you say, web apps are pretty terrible. They will never be as fast or reliable as native apps. > You still can't just search and be using a new application nearly immediately. You can't? I sure can. Gnome, kde, and Mac all have great ways of searching through your apps. The windows search is a little crap. But the great thing about a local, native environment is that the user is actually in control. If there is an app I need quick access to, I can map it to a shortcut or desktop icon. That's way faster that searching and scrolling through results. From my non web dev perspective, the reason there is such a proliferation of bloated web apps is because of the devs. All of a sudden we have a ton of developers with little to no formal training who want to make cool apps instead of good products. So they layer on plenty of dependencies. And when there's a Cool New Framework© next week, they'll incorporate that too. I just don't think devs have performance and user experience as number one priorities. The web will always be horribly slow compared to an SSD. In my opinion, the web has a couple of other fatal flaws that make it inferior to native for applications. But if we do want the web to be where all our applications to live anyway, we need to be concerned about performance as a high priority.

y4mi 7y ago
> You can't? I sure can. Gnome, kde, and Mac all have great ways of searching through your apps He was talking about using new apps, not already installed ones. And the Windows search works fine as long as you disable Cortana... As sad as that is.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

> type a bit of what you want, hit enter, click and immediately be using what you want This is a nice idea, but it’s far faster to search with mail.app. The great thing about gmail is just labels.