4 ms·

Webassembly is not magic. You still have to download and possibly cache code and assests. Call it install or not. I think win is having free software or at lea

by megous 7y ago

Webassembly is not magic. You still have to download and possibly cache code and assests. Call it install or not. I think win is having free software or at least opensource apps that are trusted by distributors and easy to analyze/modify, and actually own (meaning have on your harddrive and fully control). And we already have that win.

tinus_hn 7y ago
WebAssembly doesn’t support all the things that require installation. There is no integration, the apps can’t register for extensions, they can’t hook other programs. Most of this integration is only marginally useful anyway but people did need iOS, a popular OS that just does not support that kind of thing, to see it.
inlined 7y ago
[Former developer on the Windows Component and Applications team, renamed Developer Experience team] There's a big difference between an imperative (e.g. arbitrary code) and declarative installation process. Imperative installation is most common on Windows due to the initial decisions made by the registry designers + the Windows Installer originating from Office and starting with imperative. Declarative installs are common on the Mac where "installation" usually means dragging a binary from the DMG to your Applications folder. OS X then manages OS integrations declared in an app manifiest. Declarative installations delegate to a system which has a broader view and standard mechanisms to handle state transitions required for installs, upgrades, and uninstalls. Imperative installations frequently leave residue and are hard for even Windows to fix. I spent years of research and have several patents on trying to figure out how to distinguish between "extension points" of the OS and private state to create a sandbox with the necessary pinholes. Even with those tools handy, many software shops see no reason to upgrade because the Windows end user accepts a life of installers. I see logic in starting from scratch. This time we can create an end user expectation of declarative and (laterally + vertically) sandboxed apps. Hell, that's what we tried to do with Windows 8, but it was unfortunately restricted to the "modern" (aka full screen) apps that never caught on.
- FpUser 7y ago
  Why? I've had that clean painless install on Windows like forever. My installs are always a single executable that copies itself to a proper place, gets any data if needed from company website and when uninstalled leaves no trace on a system. Never touched registry. There is nothing here that calls for "starting from scratch"
- megous 7y ago
  In practice, installation in web browser would use a service worker and some hand written caching logic. Neither is declarative. In fact, declarative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_manifest_in_HTML5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_manifest_in_HTML5) variant of this functionality was deprecated because devs wanted more programatic way to "install" offline web apps. It's still sandboxed, and limited, so what's cached this way is perhaps easy to totally remove by the browser. But that's not because of the declarativeness, but because of sandboxing.
  - inlined 7y ago
    Makes sense, but if there’s any OS integration (e.g. file type registration, desktop links, etc) then the app isn’t truly sandboxed by these means alone.
em-bee 7y ago
but download and run is the point. with webassembly in the browser i don't have to worry that the installation tool will mess up something on my system. if i want to get rid of the application, i only need to clear the cache. sure, linux is doing that much better, but until we get linux (homebrew for windows?) installers for windows, i'll prefer webassembly, at least for casual use.

by megous 7y ago

tinus_hn 7y ago

WebAssembly doesn’t support all the things that require installation. There is no integration, the apps can’t register for extensions, they can’t hook other programs. Most of this integration is only marginally useful anyway but people did need iOS, a popular OS that just does not support that kind of thing, to see it.

inlined 7y ago

[Former developer on the Windows Component and Applications team, renamed Developer Experience team] There's a big difference between an imperative (e.g. arbitrary code) and declarative installation process. Imperative installation is most common on Windows due to the initial decisions made by the registry designers + the Windows Installer originating from Office and starting with imperative. Declarative installs are common on the Mac where "installation" usually means dragging a binary from the DMG to your Applications folder. OS X then manages OS integrations declared in an app manifiest. Declarative installations delegate to a system which has a broader view and standard mechanisms to handle state transitions required for installs, upgrades, and uninstalls. Imperative installations frequently leave residue and are hard for even Windows to fix. I spent years of research and have several patents on trying to figure out how to distinguish between "extension points" of the OS and private state to create a sandbox with the necessary pinholes. Even with those tools handy, many software shops see no reason to upgrade because the Windows end user accepts a life of installers. I see logic in starting from scratch. This time we can create an end user expectation of declarative and (laterally + vertically) sandboxed apps. Hell, that's what we tried to do with Windows 8, but it was unfortunately restricted to the "modern" (aka full screen) apps that never caught on.

FpUser 7y ago
Why? I've had that clean painless install on Windows like forever. My installs are always a single executable that copies itself to a proper place, gets any data if needed from company website and when uninstalled leaves no trace on a system. Never touched registry. There is nothing here that calls for "starting from scratch"
megous 7y ago
In practice, installation in web browser would use a service worker and some hand written caching logic. Neither is declarative. In fact, declarative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_manifest_in_HTML5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_manifest_in_HTML5) variant of this functionality was deprecated because devs wanted more programatic way to "install" offline web apps. It's still sandboxed, and limited, so what's cached this way is perhaps easy to totally remove by the browser. But that's not because of the declarativeness, but because of sandboxing.
- inlined 7y ago
  Makes sense, but if there’s any OS integration (e.g. file type registration, desktop links, etc) then the app isn’t truly sandboxed by these means alone.

em-bee 7y ago

but download and run is the point. with webassembly in the browser i don't have to worry that the installation tool will mess up something on my system. if i want to get rid of the application, i only need to clear the cache. sure, linux is doing that much better, but until we get linux (homebrew for windows?) installers for windows, i'll prefer webassembly, at least for casual use.