10 ms·

> don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks > Webviews are also a moving target so you need a big testing matrix I say thi

> don't have to deal with all the small but time consuming compatibility quirks > Webviews are also a moving target so you need a big testing matrix I say this as a front-end web app dev who would most likely be affected by this kind of shift: it might be slightly less convenient, but I wholeheartedly think it's worth doing, on several levels. People built web apps 15 years ago in the dumpster-fire that was web standards at the time (and frankly, web tooling too). Browsers, even the good ones, didn't update themselves automatically. Most of the world was still on IE which was actively hostile to web standards for the sake of lock-in (and users weren't even on the same version of IE!). There was nothing like Babel to smooth over the rough edges, there were no polyfills. And even the standards that existed, when you got the opportunity to use them, mostly sucked. I think, given all that, we can deal with supporting recent-ish Chromium and the latest Safari, if it means bolstering web diversity and saving an order of magnitude in RAM and storage.

908B64B197 6y ago
> Most of the world was still on IE which was actively hostile to web standards for the sake of lock-in (and users weren't even on the same version of IE!) More like: A lot of corporate users mandated a specific version of IE and wouldn't allow anything else to be installed.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Chrome didn't even exist until 2008. Firefox existed and had a foothold, but it was very much a minority. IE was >50% until 2010 and remained the single most popular browser until 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:BrowserUsageShare.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
  - ahepp 6y ago
    what happened in 2018-07?
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  Some corporations did that. Most didn't. The main reason IE dominated was that most people didn't care, and stuck with the default. The main reason old versions of browsers were more common than new ones was that self-updating browsers hadn't become a thing yet, and most people didn't care, and just stuck with the default. The reason most browsers stay up-to-date now is that modern browsers are all configured to self-update by default, and most people don't care, and stick with the default. I have never bought a prebuilt Windows PC, so this is pure speculation, but I am wildly guessing that the dominance of Chrome is because computers are now coming with Chrome preinstalled and configured as the default, and most people don't care, and just stick with the default.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    My experience was that IE finally got bad enough (around version 8), and Chrome got good enough, that even "grandmothers" started having everyone telling them to use Chrome, and it was so incredibly superior that you didn't have to be technical to appreciate it. Now the reason everyone uses it is because it's psychologically the new "default", whether it is on the actual system or not. Everybody knows that's just what you do when you get a new computer: you go install Chrome. And the irony is that even now, with Edge being basically the same thing, most people don't bother to re-evaluate that default assumption that "the windows browser is bad". They just use Chrome.
    - laggyluke 6y ago
      > most people don't bother to re-evaluate that default assumption that "the windows browser is bad" That's one way to look at it. Another way is to say that Microsoft has lost customer's trust and now has to work extra hard to earn it back. IMO they've learned their lesson, at least for now, but it would also be great if others could learn from Microsoft's mistake too.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > I have never bought a prebuilt Windows PC, so this is pure speculation, but I am wildly guessing that the dominance of Chrome is because computers are now coming with Chrome preinstalled and configured as the default I'm not aware of any Windows machines shipping with Chrome pre-installed. But as soon as you use any website that's owned by Google you get spammed with install links for Chrome.
datalus 6y ago
Make no mistake, it's still a dumpster fire. Just maybe less raging.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I worked on a highly complex web app for ~3 years, and we made a point to support Firefox, so whenever somebody had a Firefox-specific bug we wouldn't tell them to just use Chrome, we'd fix it. We only had 2-3 Firefox-specific issues in that entire time. I have heard that mobile safari can be a bit more unruly than the rest, though it isn't really relevant to the question at hand
  - mrec 6y ago
    Similar. Built a very complex app officially aimed at oldIE but made a point of ensuring it worked on other browsers too, largely on a skunkworks basis. A few years later (when we're no longer actively working on the app) everyone switched to Chrome and it Just Worked. Someone tried it on an iPad and it Just Worked (modulo some fat-finger challenges with small UI affordances). At the time, jQuery was a big help in this, especially in hiding the event model mess. Things are a lot better now. Although I do wish we had a strict compatibility-checking layer that'd warn you if you used any feature of the web platform that wasn't supported by everything you wanted to support.
danudey 6y ago
Also: a lot of our "Electron" apps are essentially Electron frontends to the existing web frontend. For example, Slack-the-Electron-app and Slack-the-web-app are fundamentally identical, aside from likely some platform integration features and so on. That means that, likely, a lot of these Electron apps would already work in, for example, a Safari or Edge webview, since the web version has to anyway. I sincerely doubt that they're taking the time to strip out that compatibility, since the only reason to do so would be efficiency and if you're using Electron that's not a priority. IOW, for many applications, there's a near-100% chance that everything would function with little to no extra work, and for most of the rest it would likely take very little.
- Klonoar 6y ago
  Slack originally was platform specific webviews, and migrated to avoid issues like what is mentioned in this thread. One of the engineers who did it has even commented on HN to explain this.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - brundolf 6y ago
    It also launched 8 years ago; the web has changed a lot since then. Edge wasn't even around until 2015, much less being used for webviews.
    - Klonoar 6y ago
      This sounds like you didn't look up and read the comment in question. Problems with cross-platform webviews stopped being the HTML/CSS/JS layer long ago; it's integration, availability, and rate-of-updates that are common blockers. Call me when Microsoft actually ships WebView2 with the OS.
      - efwfwef 6y ago
        if you would link to that comment it would be helpful
jlokier 6y ago
I run three browsers on my desktop, because the number of things that don't work properly in anything except recent Chrome is enough that I keep encountering issues, I don't want to use Chrome for my regular browsing, and both Safari and Firefox have issues on some sites. On my tablet, a number of current websites don't run even on Chrome, because the tablet isn't particularly new, so it doesn't have current Chrome. It's still great hardware in perfect condition though, everything that does run on it is perfectly smooth and so on, and I still use it. Youtube in particular is fine. Literally the only reason to buy a new one would be to satisfy the software treadmill. My old phone didn't run Chrome (or Safari). It had Firefox. The only reason I switched to a newer phone, using Android, was because of sites that gradually didn't run well on Firefox any more. That was annoying, having to ditch a perfectly great phone and replace it with something better for the web but worse for other things. I have a Macbook Pro at home. I'm pretty happy with it, it's still a fine machine, I use it for work every day. It runs the latest Safari that's safe to run on it, but that's not the latest Safari, because it would have problems running the most recent OS. This brave new world of "I'm sure we'll be fine supporting recentish Chrome and latest Safari" is a world of exclusion. I don't like the memory usage of Electron, but I prefer it to applications that are a bit broken! Also, to be honest, I've been looking at memory usage. Electron uses much less than any of the three big browsers. You may know that Chrome famously starts a new process for each tab, and Safari does too. Firefox isn't far behind. As a result, the memory saved by running a new page in an already running browser compared with Electron isn't as much as it was long ago, back in the days when tabs shared memory. This is visible with Safari, as the website name shows up in the system utility for viewing process memory. I know, that feels wrong somehow, but it's true. Finally, when using a system WebView, will that save memory if it's opening a separate instance of the system's browser? It must be separate in some ways, if opening an application that uses a WebView doesn't open all your saved tabs from last time the browser was open. (And it's a horrible experience if opening an application does open all the other tabs.)
- encom 6y ago
  One major benefit of running webapps in an actual browser like Firefox, instead of Electron, is that I can have uBlock and a handful of other defensive plugins, to prevent shady things happening behind my back.
morpheuskafka 6y ago
That's fine for someone who already keeps current with front-end stuff, but someone who is a desktop app developer is more likely to just go native than try to make a desktop app that tracks 3+ browser engines of wildly varying versions (luckily 7 is out of support now, but it still might be desired to support for some desktop apps in which case now you have IE to deal with). Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps.
- briandear 6y ago
  > Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps. I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app. Instead of writing platform specific apps that leverage the power and capabilities of those platforms, we get a jack of all trades and master of none. Electron is a business decision, not an enlightened technical one. What value does electron add to the user? I would argue none. That Slack can’t find the resources to write actual Swift for a Mac App is just amazing to me. Instead we are essentially interacting with a lowest-common-denominator web app. Is a chat app that hard to write natively? We’d get better performance, a smaller footprint, and a more polished, platform-specific product.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    > I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app The point is that its effectively a web app. > What value does electron add to the user? They have a desktop app faster than if it was being built natively.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Or at all, how many Electron apps would bother with native Linux clients for example. Some maybe but certainly not all and probably not most either.
oxymoron 6y ago
In 2008, when IE7 came out, I cried of joy. I turned 22 that year, so the 7 years with only IE6 and Firefox was a significant chunk of my life. Firefox showed us that the web wasn't finished and could still be improved, and then came Firebug which made Firefox first web dev the obvious choice. But the vast majority still used IE6, so there was always a miserable step in the project of fixing all the IE bugs. After doing it for years and knowing your foe, it was by then a relatively quick and manageable experience. The real pain was in knowing all the CSS2 features and other goodies that could never be used. Seeing Microsoft recognizing that, yes indeed, the web wasn't finished in 2001 was actually an emotional moment at that point. So yeah, the situation is without doubt much better now. I think people tend to forget (or aren't aware) that Microsoft actively said "there's no more work to be done here" and stopped all progress for 7 years. There's been some progress on the web since 2014, as a point of comparison.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  I've had to say this a fair few times here, but I'll keep saying it. IEDevToolbar, which Firebug was pretty much a clone of, came out a year before Firebug. And it took Firebug years to catch up in feature parity, as far as I remember. So, firebug didn't make it the dev tool of choice. We all just hated microsoft. And tabbed browsing was great.
  - oxymoron 6y ago
    I was young and dogmatic, so I did admittedly despise Microsoft back then. I can't recall I ever heard of IEDevToolbar, though. Did it really feature the DOM tree view where you could do CSS manipulation? I always had the impression that it was a Firebug invention, but I could be wrong about that.
    - treve 6y ago
      The DOM inspector view in Firefox predates Firebug by years. My memory might be a bit shaky, but it may even have existed in Mozilla Web Browser? It really looked like a 'DOM tree/tree of Javascript classes' though, not really like the inspector we have today.
Tijdreiziger 6y ago
Anecdotally I wrote some JavaScript just today (I'm not a frontend dev but I write some simple stuff for fun sometimes). It seemed to me that every modern feature you'd care about is now widely supported. I used the JS fetch API and template strings and these things just work in modern browsers. I even encoded my web fonts in WOFF2 only, because it's so widely supported that I didn't see the point in bothering with WOFF1 too.
Xevi 6y ago
Tauri also uses MSHTML (Internet Explorer) on Windows. And there's no way I'm going back to developing for that.
- nicklarsennz 6y ago
  Isn't IE just using Chrome now? Or do you mean support for old IE?
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Their browser is. But Windows' webview is still the IE11 engine.
  - Xevi 6y ago
    No, IE is still the same. But Edge has moved to Chromium.
smt1 6y ago
There is also servo, which may not be as complete as Chromium, but is definitely interesting architecture wise, especially with the number of virtual machines and compilers written in Rust these days.

908B64B197 6y ago

> Most of the world was still on IE which was actively hostile to web standards for the sake of lock-in (and users weren't even on the same version of IE!) More like: A lot of corporate users mandated a specific version of IE and wouldn't allow anything else to be installed.

brundolf 6y ago
Chrome didn't even exist until 2008. Firefox existed and had a foothold, but it was very much a minority. IE was >50% until 2010 and remained the single most popular browser until 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:BrowserUsageShare.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
- ahepp 6y ago
  what happened in 2018-07?
mumblemumble 6y ago
Some corporations did that. Most didn't. The main reason IE dominated was that most people didn't care, and stuck with the default. The main reason old versions of browsers were more common than new ones was that self-updating browsers hadn't become a thing yet, and most people didn't care, and just stuck with the default. The reason most browsers stay up-to-date now is that modern browsers are all configured to self-update by default, and most people don't care, and stick with the default. I have never bought a prebuilt Windows PC, so this is pure speculation, but I am wildly guessing that the dominance of Chrome is because computers are now coming with Chrome preinstalled and configured as the default, and most people don't care, and just stick with the default.
- brundolf 6y ago
  My experience was that IE finally got bad enough (around version 8), and Chrome got good enough, that even "grandmothers" started having everyone telling them to use Chrome, and it was so incredibly superior that you didn't have to be technical to appreciate it. Now the reason everyone uses it is because it's psychologically the new "default", whether it is on the actual system or not. Everybody knows that's just what you do when you get a new computer: you go install Chrome. And the irony is that even now, with Edge being basically the same thing, most people don't bother to re-evaluate that default assumption that "the windows browser is bad". They just use Chrome.
  - laggyluke 6y ago
    > most people don't bother to re-evaluate that default assumption that "the windows browser is bad" That's one way to look at it. Another way is to say that Microsoft has lost customer's trust and now has to work extra hard to earn it back. IMO they've learned their lesson, at least for now, but it would also be great if others could learn from Microsoft's mistake too.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > I have never bought a prebuilt Windows PC, so this is pure speculation, but I am wildly guessing that the dominance of Chrome is because computers are now coming with Chrome preinstalled and configured as the default I'm not aware of any Windows machines shipping with Chrome pre-installed. But as soon as you use any website that's owned by Google you get spammed with install links for Chrome.

datalus 6y ago

Make no mistake, it's still a dumpster fire. Just maybe less raging.

brundolf 6y ago
I worked on a highly complex web app for ~3 years, and we made a point to support Firefox, so whenever somebody had a Firefox-specific bug we wouldn't tell them to just use Chrome, we'd fix it. We only had 2-3 Firefox-specific issues in that entire time. I have heard that mobile safari can be a bit more unruly than the rest, though it isn't really relevant to the question at hand
- mrec 6y ago
  Similar. Built a very complex app officially aimed at oldIE but made a point of ensuring it worked on other browsers too, largely on a skunkworks basis. A few years later (when we're no longer actively working on the app) everyone switched to Chrome and it Just Worked. Someone tried it on an iPad and it Just Worked (modulo some fat-finger challenges with small UI affordances). At the time, jQuery was a big help in this, especially in hiding the event model mess. Things are a lot better now. Although I do wish we had a strict compatibility-checking layer that'd warn you if you used any feature of the web platform that wasn't supported by everything you wanted to support.

danudey 6y ago

Also: a lot of our "Electron" apps are essentially Electron frontends to the existing web frontend. For example, Slack-the-Electron-app and Slack-the-web-app are fundamentally identical, aside from likely some platform integration features and so on. That means that, likely, a lot of these Electron apps would already work in, for example, a Safari or Edge webview, since the web version has to anyway. I sincerely doubt that they're taking the time to strip out that compatibility, since the only reason to do so would be efficiency and if you're using Electron that's not a priority. IOW, for many applications, there's a near-100% chance that everything would function with little to no extra work, and for most of the rest it would likely take very little.

Klonoar 6y ago
Slack originally was platform specific webviews, and migrated to avoid issues like what is mentioned in this thread. One of the engineers who did it has even commented on HN to explain this.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- brundolf 6y ago
  It also launched 8 years ago; the web has changed a lot since then. Edge wasn't even around until 2015, much less being used for webviews.
  - Klonoar 6y ago
    This sounds like you didn't look up and read the comment in question. Problems with cross-platform webviews stopped being the HTML/CSS/JS layer long ago; it's integration, availability, and rate-of-updates that are common blockers. Call me when Microsoft actually ships WebView2 with the OS.
    - efwfwef 6y ago
      if you would link to that comment it would be helpful

jlokier 6y ago

I run three browsers on my desktop, because the number of things that don't work properly in anything except recent Chrome is enough that I keep encountering issues, I don't want to use Chrome for my regular browsing, and both Safari and Firefox have issues on some sites. On my tablet, a number of current websites don't run even on Chrome, because the tablet isn't particularly new, so it doesn't have current Chrome. It's still great hardware in perfect condition though, everything that does run on it is perfectly smooth and so on, and I still use it. Youtube in particular is fine. Literally the only reason to buy a new one would be to satisfy the software treadmill. My old phone didn't run Chrome (or Safari). It had Firefox. The only reason I switched to a newer phone, using Android, was because of sites that gradually didn't run well on Firefox any more. That was annoying, having to ditch a perfectly great phone and replace it with something better for the web but worse for other things. I have a Macbook Pro at home. I'm pretty happy with it, it's still a fine machine, I use it for work every day. It runs the latest Safari that's safe to run on it, but that's not the latest Safari, because it would have problems running the most recent OS. This brave new world of "I'm sure we'll be fine supporting recentish Chrome and latest Safari" is a world of exclusion. I don't like the memory usage of Electron, but I prefer it to applications that are a bit broken! Also, to be honest, I've been looking at memory usage. Electron uses much less than any of the three big browsers. You may know that Chrome famously starts a new process for each tab, and Safari does too. Firefox isn't far behind. As a result, the memory saved by running a new page in an already running browser compared with Electron isn't as much as it was long ago, back in the days when tabs shared memory. This is visible with Safari, as the website name shows up in the system utility for viewing process memory. I know, that feels wrong somehow, but it's true. Finally, when using a system WebView, will that save memory if it's opening a separate instance of the system's browser? It must be separate in some ways, if opening an application that uses a WebView doesn't open all your saved tabs from last time the browser was open. (And it's a horrible experience if opening an application does open all the other tabs.)

encom 6y ago
One major benefit of running webapps in an actual browser like Firefox, instead of Electron, is that I can have uBlock and a handful of other defensive plugins, to prevent shady things happening behind my back.

morpheuskafka 6y ago

That's fine for someone who already keeps current with front-end stuff, but someone who is a desktop app developer is more likely to just go native than try to make a desktop app that tracks 3+ browser engines of wildly varying versions (luckily 7 is out of support now, but it still might be desired to support for some desktop apps in which case now you have IE to deal with). Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps.

briandear 6y ago
> Electron gives the promise of total code re-use across platforms which is what makes web technologies more suitable for desktop apps. I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app. Instead of writing platform specific apps that leverage the power and capabilities of those platforms, we get a jack of all trades and master of none. Electron is a business decision, not an enlightened technical one. What value does electron add to the user? I would argue none. That Slack can’t find the resources to write actual Swift for a Mac App is just amazing to me. Instead we are essentially interacting with a lowest-common-denominator web app. Is a chat app that hard to write natively? We’d get better performance, a smaller footprint, and a more polished, platform-specific product.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  > I am not sure what the point is of Electron: a shitty-resource hungry app that literally is a wrapped web-app The point is that its effectively a web app. > What value does electron add to the user? They have a desktop app faster than if it was being built natively.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Or at all, how many Electron apps would bother with native Linux clients for example. Some maybe but certainly not all and probably not most either.

oxymoron 6y ago

In 2008, when IE7 came out, I cried of joy. I turned 22 that year, so the 7 years with only IE6 and Firefox was a significant chunk of my life. Firefox showed us that the web wasn't finished and could still be improved, and then came Firebug which made Firefox first web dev the obvious choice. But the vast majority still used IE6, so there was always a miserable step in the project of fixing all the IE bugs. After doing it for years and knowing your foe, it was by then a relatively quick and manageable experience. The real pain was in knowing all the CSS2 features and other goodies that could never be used. Seeing Microsoft recognizing that, yes indeed, the web wasn't finished in 2001 was actually an emotional moment at that point. So yeah, the situation is without doubt much better now. I think people tend to forget (or aren't aware) that Microsoft actively said "there's no more work to be done here" and stopped all progress for 7 years. There's been some progress on the web since 2014, as a point of comparison.

mattmanser 6y ago
I've had to say this a fair few times here, but I'll keep saying it. IEDevToolbar, which Firebug was pretty much a clone of, came out a year before Firebug. And it took Firebug years to catch up in feature parity, as far as I remember. So, firebug didn't make it the dev tool of choice. We all just hated microsoft. And tabbed browsing was great.
- oxymoron 6y ago
  I was young and dogmatic, so I did admittedly despise Microsoft back then. I can't recall I ever heard of IEDevToolbar, though. Did it really feature the DOM tree view where you could do CSS manipulation? I always had the impression that it was a Firebug invention, but I could be wrong about that.
  - treve 6y ago
    The DOM inspector view in Firefox predates Firebug by years. My memory might be a bit shaky, but it may even have existed in Mozilla Web Browser? It really looked like a 'DOM tree/tree of Javascript classes' though, not really like the inspector we have today.

Tijdreiziger 6y ago

Anecdotally I wrote some JavaScript just today (I'm not a frontend dev but I write some simple stuff for fun sometimes). It seemed to me that every modern feature you'd care about is now widely supported. I used the JS fetch API and template strings and these things just work in modern browsers. I even encoded my web fonts in WOFF2 only, because it's so widely supported that I didn't see the point in bothering with WOFF1 too.

Xevi 6y ago

Tauri also uses MSHTML (Internet Explorer) on Windows. And there's no way I'm going back to developing for that.

nicklarsennz 6y ago
Isn't IE just using Chrome now? Or do you mean support for old IE?
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Their browser is. But Windows' webview is still the IE11 engine.
- Xevi 6y ago
  No, IE is still the same. But Edge has moved to Chromium.

smt1 6y ago

There is also servo, which may not be as complete as Chromium, but is definitely interesting architecture wise, especially with the number of virtual machines and compilers written in Rust these days.