10 ms·

I love how people like to make browser versions of everything. From chat apps to email clients to games. But they all end up consuming 10x the memory but are st

I love how people like to make browser versions of everything. From chat apps to email clients to games. But they all end up consuming 10x the memory but are still 10x slower than their native counterparts !

koonsolo 6y ago
On the other hand, they don't require admin rights, disk space or installation time, and are platform independent (including for example chromebooks)
- umaar 6y ago
  I'm all for web apps, but does CS actually require admin rights? > disk space CS just downloaded 185mb of network resources for me to play. I would have thought those resources are stored on my disk, and not just in memory. > installation time That 185mb of resources took ~1 minute to download. By the time it had finished, it told me the server was full. Regardless this is still very impressive.
  - koonsolo 6y ago
    I'm not going to claim that one is better than the other, because it's all about tradeoffs. But I'm sure more people played this right now because of the low barrier to entry. And the admin rights might not even be technical. Not a lot of people are fond of installing games on the laptop from work. But like I said, everything has tradeoffs.
    - andybak 6y ago
      > But I'm sure more people played this right now because of the low barrier to entry. This is the key point. If I'd seen a post about CS with a zip of an executable I would have passed. Why? Because it probably wouldn't have run correctly or I would have had some other issue with it. Let alone checking the provenance and worrying about malware.
  - gsich 6y ago
    >I'm all for web apps, but does CS actually require admin rights? No. The cracked version(s) that are played in schools and whatnot are usually just a zip file you extract and run.
    - orionblastar 6y ago
      More like a portable CS that can be placed in the documents directory and run from there. I remember my son's cousins installing software while not as admin on my Windows PC by installing in the documents directory. CS, AOL Chat, etc. A good way to get malware as well. I could never trust those cracked versions. One cracked version made CS 1.6 with Navy Seals looking for bin Laden, which I thought was fun.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  The first two are trivially solved by portable applications (AppDirs, Application Bundles, AppImage, etc.). Platform independence is only kinda true, as many of these things don't actually function correctly on anything but Chrome, so they effectively target just one platform.
  - 32gbsd 6y ago
    Omg the modern web has become a monoculture!
  - Klinky 6y ago
    Chrome runs on many different platforms.
- tasogare 6y ago
  Those are all very minors inconveniences. Installation took a few clicks, disk space is negligible for that category of apps (and if it isn’t re-downloading on each access is a more pressing issue). Only the platform thing matters, yet the exemple you give isn’t convincing given it’s super low market share.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Seems a bit unfair to only acknowledge one side of the trade-offs. Obviously native apps win the perf side. How about being able to play with your friends after just handing them a link? Native 1.6 doesn't even run on my computer at all. I think browser ports are the only hope that old games have at coming back. The other month I played Nox's quest mode with my friend on a browser emscripten port (plus a lot of custom code / networking to get it online). And it's a game I thought I'd never get to play again. Gog.com sells Nox for Windows but of course the servers are long offline. The adolescent glee over how much worse browser applications run really misses the big picture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nox_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nox_(video_game)
- apetresc 6y ago
  Hey, can you send me a link to that Nox port? What a blast from the past - I remember saving up to buy that game as a kid :)
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    The subreddit has a small community of people playing. iirc there's a community server you can point the Gog.com binary to: http://old.reddit.com/r/nox http://old.reddit.com/r/nox. (The Gog.com binary actually runs on macOS if you're pre-Catalina as it's 32bit, they just removed the indication since everyone is on Catalina now) The browser "port" is here: https://playnox.xyz/ https://playnox.xyz/ (200mb) -- Whether online play is available or not can be hit or miss. The single player campaign does work as well -- worth it for insta-nostalgia. I say "port" in quotes because it's not just a matter of `cat nox.exe | emscripten > nox.js` of course. The creator posts in the subreddit / the nox community forums and has some really interesting technical comments where he explains some of the challenges. People who can pull off something like this (talk about cross-cutting engineering skills) really blow me away.
    - valerij 6y ago
      nice. i once spent a week trying to hack the engine to support widescreen resolutions. time to re-play it :D
modzu 6y ago
then there are apps like photopea.com. feature parity with Photoshop, but starts immediately, consumes virtually no memory, requires no special permissions, runs on virtually any os. compare that to the adobe app which loads half a dozen services, takes about a minute to load, wont run on linux, etc...
lqet 6y ago
I would actually love to see an old browser (e.g. IE 6) purely implemented in JavaScript to run inside a browser, without using the browser's DOM rendering capabilities (the web page should be rendered by the JS code on a <canvas> element, input events should be correctly handled, and of course a JS engine also has to be implemented).
- userbinator 6y ago
  Here's Win95 in a browser: https://win95.ajf.me/ https://win95.ajf.me/
- meditative 6y ago
  If you haven't seen The Birth & Death of JavaScript, you're in for a treat. Gimp running in Chrome running inside Firefox https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
austincheney 6y ago
What is a solid alternative that allow access to applications cross OS without an explicit installation step?
zitterbewegung 6y ago
Well since we now have 10x the memory and 10x the compute we are able to do this. Also, you don't need no stinkin App Store, zero time for installation. The only next step would be to have everything open source I think these are good tradeoffs. I rather have Freedom than performance and more and more tech users are doing this.
- pixelpoet 6y ago
  Justifying everything becoming a web app to avoid app stores seems to me a lot like swallowing a spider to catch the fly.
  - tryptophan 6y ago
    Agree. I seriously do not understand what is so hard about going to a website and downloading a program. It takes literally all of 30 seconds.
holoduke 6y ago
think the biggest issue with browser apps is proper asset management. what you see most of the times is a huge payload of assets getting loaded at the start. I would like to see some kind of streaming service for assets. specially with textures that would be really neat.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  The hard part there isn't a browser vs native thing (native apps also generally ship with all of the assets in a front-loaded client) but abstracting your rendering pipeline to handle streaming or incremental LoD over the network. It's more of challenge of taking the time to add that level of polish. Kind of like the rare native game, like League of Legends, that will let you play before the entire client is finished downloading. Being a native app didn't give Riot Games that for free, they had to specifically build it for their game. Even in the native game market, it's AAA-level polish for a small fraction of games.
throwawhey00 6y ago
This is a flippant useless negative comment on someone's cool effort. Looking at your other comments, and at your blog - everything is negative. "This sucks, this is crap, I would never use this". What's with all the negativity? Just give creating comments and posts about stuff you like a try. The internet is not short of critics to make useless negative comments.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Yeah, enumerating why something sucks is trivial. Anyone can do that about anything. Yet for some reason it's tempting to do it. Maybe because it makes us feel like a critic? For some reason it takes more effort to see the positives in something or someone, even ourselves. It's often a good practice to stop and think of the positives of something. Maybe it's not so obvious. Why did someone decide to build it this way? They probably are well aware of the downsides (after all, they're the one who built it) yet they saw some upsides. They must have thought the upsides outweighed the downsides. What were they? The harder that question is to answer, I think the more useful the practice is. Internet (and HN) discourse would be a lot better if we did more of that. I know it's a challenge for me -- it's really easy to get stuck in a negative thought loop, especially while spending so much time on social media (incl Twitter, Reddit, and HN) where we like to award ourselves points for being critical.
  - Zhyl 6y ago
    This was actually explored in this Cracked article [0] which I heard about on the Cracked Podcast. Basically, being cynical and negative is one of the easiest ways of appearing smart because you don't need to back up any of your assertions and people are less likely to be called out for shitting on something. [0] https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-stupidest-things-that-make-people-proud/ https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-stupidest-things-that-mak...
    - baud147258 6y ago
      I don't see how being negative allow one to not back anything, I can say something sucks, but I'd have to explain why. And people will get called for shitting on something, see the GP comment. I'd even say you're less likely to be called out for being negative without giving an explanation than being positive without giving an explanation. Though it's usually easier to explain why something sucks than why something is great, since a negative explanation has only to find which part don't work, rather than explaining why something is globally good.
Spooky23 6y ago
I think mad props are due to people figuring out how to port non-trivial, closed-source applications to browser javascript environments.
- Narishma 6y ago
  This is a clone, not a port.
nearmuse 6y ago
I didn't check but I don't think what you said is the case with graphical resources.
taf2 6y ago
Was it 10x faster to build and easier to maintain or are 10x of statistics not true?
mrlala 6y ago
It taking like 1gb of ram in chrome. Your point? I literally just clicked on a link, downloaded a few assets and was into an online FPS. Virtually any modern computer in the world no matter what OS/browser should be able to do the same. But I guess for someone like you it has to be written in assembly so it's 100% efficient, even though you take 100x more to attempt to get it working than your counterpart.. and you never actually finish.
ramblerman 6y ago
This is a pretty short sighted observation. It's obvious to most tech folk here that yes, moving up to higher abstractions, higher level languages and paradigms comes at a performance cost. But we could have just stopped at assembler with that insight. I mean all the rest is just slower, and less efficient.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > This is a pretty short sighted observation. It's obvious to most tech folk here that yes, moving up to higher abstractions, higher level languages and paradigms comes at a performance cost. This is not even necessarily true. There are zero cost abstractions. Compilers can generate better assembly code than the overwhelming majority of developers.
dumbfounder 6y ago
It works well on my laptop without installing a darn thing. Why do I care if it's 10x the memory if I have that memory to use? Graphics are good enough. Gameplay is like I remember it 20 years ago (was it that long?!?!). I think this is pretty amazing.

koonsolo 6y ago

On the other hand, they don't require admin rights, disk space or installation time, and are platform independent (including for example chromebooks)

umaar 6y ago
I'm all for web apps, but does CS actually require admin rights? > disk space CS just downloaded 185mb of network resources for me to play. I would have thought those resources are stored on my disk, and not just in memory. > installation time That 185mb of resources took ~1 minute to download. By the time it had finished, it told me the server was full. Regardless this is still very impressive.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  I'm not going to claim that one is better than the other, because it's all about tradeoffs. But I'm sure more people played this right now because of the low barrier to entry. And the admin rights might not even be technical. Not a lot of people are fond of installing games on the laptop from work. But like I said, everything has tradeoffs.
  - andybak 6y ago
    > But I'm sure more people played this right now because of the low barrier to entry. This is the key point. If I'd seen a post about CS with a zip of an executable I would have passed. Why? Because it probably wouldn't have run correctly or I would have had some other issue with it. Let alone checking the provenance and worrying about malware.
- gsich 6y ago
  >I'm all for web apps, but does CS actually require admin rights? No. The cracked version(s) that are played in schools and whatnot are usually just a zip file you extract and run.
  - orionblastar 6y ago
    More like a portable CS that can be placed in the documents directory and run from there. I remember my son's cousins installing software while not as admin on my Windows PC by installing in the documents directory. CS, AOL Chat, etc. A good way to get malware as well. I could never trust those cracked versions. One cracked version made CS 1.6 with Navy Seals looking for bin Laden, which I thought was fun.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
The first two are trivially solved by portable applications (AppDirs, Application Bundles, AppImage, etc.). Platform independence is only kinda true, as many of these things don't actually function correctly on anything but Chrome, so they effectively target just one platform.
- 32gbsd 6y ago
  Omg the modern web has become a monoculture!
- Klinky 6y ago
  Chrome runs on many different platforms.
tasogare 6y ago
Those are all very minors inconveniences. Installation took a few clicks, disk space is negligible for that category of apps (and if it isn’t re-downloading on each access is a more pressing issue). Only the platform thing matters, yet the exemple you give isn’t convincing given it’s super low market share.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Seems a bit unfair to only acknowledge one side of the trade-offs. Obviously native apps win the perf side. How about being able to play with your friends after just handing them a link? Native 1.6 doesn't even run on my computer at all. I think browser ports are the only hope that old games have at coming back. The other month I played Nox's quest mode with my friend on a browser emscripten port (plus a lot of custom code / networking to get it online). And it's a game I thought I'd never get to play again. Gog.com sells Nox for Windows but of course the servers are long offline. The adolescent glee over how much worse browser applications run really misses the big picture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nox_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nox_(video_game)

apetresc 6y ago
Hey, can you send me a link to that Nox port? What a blast from the past - I remember saving up to buy that game as a kid :)
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  The subreddit has a small community of people playing. iirc there's a community server you can point the Gog.com binary to: http://old.reddit.com/r/nox http://old.reddit.com/r/nox. (The Gog.com binary actually runs on macOS if you're pre-Catalina as it's 32bit, they just removed the indication since everyone is on Catalina now) The browser "port" is here: https://playnox.xyz/ https://playnox.xyz/ (200mb) -- Whether online play is available or not can be hit or miss. The single player campaign does work as well -- worth it for insta-nostalgia. I say "port" in quotes because it's not just a matter of `cat nox.exe | emscripten > nox.js` of course. The creator posts in the subreddit / the nox community forums and has some really interesting technical comments where he explains some of the challenges. People who can pull off something like this (talk about cross-cutting engineering skills) really blow me away.
  - valerij 6y ago
    nice. i once spent a week trying to hack the engine to support widescreen resolutions. time to re-play it :D

modzu 6y ago

then there are apps like photopea.com. feature parity with Photoshop, but starts immediately, consumes virtually no memory, requires no special permissions, runs on virtually any os. compare that to the adobe app which loads half a dozen services, takes about a minute to load, wont run on linux, etc...

lqet 6y ago

I would actually love to see an old browser (e.g. IE 6) purely implemented in JavaScript to run inside a browser, without using the browser's DOM rendering capabilities (the web page should be rendered by the JS code on a <canvas> element, input events should be correctly handled, and of course a JS engine also has to be implemented).

userbinator 6y ago
Here's Win95 in a browser: https://win95.ajf.me/ https://win95.ajf.me/
meditative 6y ago
If you haven't seen The Birth & Death of JavaScript, you're in for a treat. Gimp running in Chrome running inside Firefox https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

austincheney 6y ago

What is a solid alternative that allow access to applications cross OS without an explicit installation step?

zitterbewegung 6y ago

Well since we now have 10x the memory and 10x the compute we are able to do this. Also, you don't need no stinkin App Store, zero time for installation. The only next step would be to have everything open source I think these are good tradeoffs. I rather have Freedom than performance and more and more tech users are doing this.

pixelpoet 6y ago
Justifying everything becoming a web app to avoid app stores seems to me a lot like swallowing a spider to catch the fly.
- tryptophan 6y ago
  Agree. I seriously do not understand what is so hard about going to a website and downloading a program. It takes literally all of 30 seconds.

holoduke 6y ago

think the biggest issue with browser apps is proper asset management. what you see most of the times is a huge payload of assets getting loaded at the start. I would like to see some kind of streaming service for assets. specially with textures that would be really neat.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
The hard part there isn't a browser vs native thing (native apps also generally ship with all of the assets in a front-loaded client) but abstracting your rendering pipeline to handle streaming or incremental LoD over the network. It's more of challenge of taking the time to add that level of polish. Kind of like the rare native game, like League of Legends, that will let you play before the entire client is finished downloading. Being a native app didn't give Riot Games that for free, they had to specifically build it for their game. Even in the native game market, it's AAA-level polish for a small fraction of games.

throwawhey00 6y ago

This is a flippant useless negative comment on someone's cool effort. Looking at your other comments, and at your blog - everything is negative. "This sucks, this is crap, I would never use this". What's with all the negativity? Just give creating comments and posts about stuff you like a try. The internet is not short of critics to make useless negative comments.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Yeah, enumerating why something sucks is trivial. Anyone can do that about anything. Yet for some reason it's tempting to do it. Maybe because it makes us feel like a critic? For some reason it takes more effort to see the positives in something or someone, even ourselves. It's often a good practice to stop and think of the positives of something. Maybe it's not so obvious. Why did someone decide to build it this way? They probably are well aware of the downsides (after all, they're the one who built it) yet they saw some upsides. They must have thought the upsides outweighed the downsides. What were they? The harder that question is to answer, I think the more useful the practice is. Internet (and HN) discourse would be a lot better if we did more of that. I know it's a challenge for me -- it's really easy to get stuck in a negative thought loop, especially while spending so much time on social media (incl Twitter, Reddit, and HN) where we like to award ourselves points for being critical.
- Zhyl 6y ago
  This was actually explored in this Cracked article [0] which I heard about on the Cracked Podcast. Basically, being cynical and negative is one of the easiest ways of appearing smart because you don't need to back up any of your assertions and people are less likely to be called out for shitting on something. [0] https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-stupidest-things-that-make-people-proud/ https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-stupidest-things-that-mak...
  - baud147258 6y ago
    I don't see how being negative allow one to not back anything, I can say something sucks, but I'd have to explain why. And people will get called for shitting on something, see the GP comment. I'd even say you're less likely to be called out for being negative without giving an explanation than being positive without giving an explanation. Though it's usually easier to explain why something sucks than why something is great, since a negative explanation has only to find which part don't work, rather than explaining why something is globally good.

Spooky23 6y ago

I think mad props are due to people figuring out how to port non-trivial, closed-source applications to browser javascript environments.

Narishma 6y ago
This is a clone, not a port.

nearmuse 6y ago

I didn't check but I don't think what you said is the case with graphical resources.

taf2 6y ago

Was it 10x faster to build and easier to maintain or are 10x of statistics not true?

mrlala 6y ago

It taking like 1gb of ram in chrome. Your point? I literally just clicked on a link, downloaded a few assets and was into an online FPS. Virtually any modern computer in the world no matter what OS/browser should be able to do the same. But I guess for someone like you it has to be written in assembly so it's 100% efficient, even though you take 100x more to attempt to get it working than your counterpart.. and you never actually finish.

ramblerman 6y ago

This is a pretty short sighted observation. It's obvious to most tech folk here that yes, moving up to higher abstractions, higher level languages and paradigms comes at a performance cost. But we could have just stopped at assembler with that insight. I mean all the rest is just slower, and less efficient.

outworlder 6y ago
> This is a pretty short sighted observation. It's obvious to most tech folk here that yes, moving up to higher abstractions, higher level languages and paradigms comes at a performance cost. This is not even necessarily true. There are zero cost abstractions. Compilers can generate better assembly code than the overwhelming majority of developers.

dumbfounder 6y ago

It works well on my laptop without installing a darn thing. Why do I care if it's 10x the memory if I have that memory to use? Graphics are good enough. Gameplay is like I remember it 20 years ago (was it that long?!?!). I think this is pretty amazing.