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The whole security angle is an after-the-fact rationalization and the vast majority of users (not developers, users) never cared much about it - as anyone in th
by badsectoracula 7y ago
The whole security angle is an after-the-fact rationalization and the vast majority of users (not developers, users) never cared much about it - as anyone in the IT department of pretty much every company can tell you (again, users, not developers, not sysops, not admins, but regular end users).
The real reason we see so many web apps is that the decision on what technology to use for an application is largely something developers decide (with "developers" i do not only mean individuals but also companies and organizations that develop applications) and the web gives developers pretty much complete control over what is going on in their application, what the users can do and how, allows them to force everyone use the same version, allows realtime monitoring of how the users use their applications and provides the vendor locking tightest than the most obfuscated native application could have (since all the data is stored in the servers).
Security is just a very convenient excuse since a lot of people shut down their critical thinking whenever it comes up (my guess for why that happens is that since a lot of people have been shamed by supposedly security experts and even more people have mimicked that shaming, we ended up with everyone just shutting up whenever security is brought up to avoid looking like That Clueless One that would be shamed next - but that is just a guess).
But the real reason is the heavy control that web apps give to the developers and the vast majority of users do not really understand how biased against them that setup is.
- rictic 7y agoHave you looked at the network traffic or behavior of most native apps? Continuous monitoring and cloud-based state are the norm everywhere, and for the same reasons.
- badsectoracula 7y agoNot all apps do that (in fact i cannot think of any desktop application that i have installed that does something like this - though if i could, it would get the boot) and because applications run locally it is possible to monitor and control their behavior (indeed, with a server you just don't know what is going on, but with a local app you can at least tell that something is going on). Also, while the UI is far from ideal (at least on Windows), you can block individual applications from accessing the Internet. It should be much simpler than it is now, though.
- austurist 7y agoThere is an another interesting property of web applications: the can't be stolen. I guess, this could also be a reason of their ubiquity.
- badsectoracula 7y agoWhat do you mean with stolen? Someone making something similar or making unlicensed copies? For the former i do not see how web apps prevent that and for the latter that only matters when the developer asks for money for each license, which is extremely rare with web apps anyway (the closest is subscriptions and rentals but that happens with desktop/native applications too, e.g. see Adobe and Autodesk). But even that is really a facet of the heavily developer biased control i mentioned that web apps provide.