27 ms·

The desktop is broken not because of the file/folder paradigm but because we stopped using files to represent information. Figma, Slack, and Notion should save

The desktop is broken not because of the file/folder paradigm but because we stopped using files to represent information. Figma, Slack, and Notion should save their information to disk. You should be able to open a Notion document, or a Figma design, from your desktop, instead of through their Web interface. You should be able to save a Facebook post or Tweet and their replies to disk. Why can't you? Well, for one, social media companies don't want you to save stuff locally, because they can't serve ads with local content. Furthermore, browser APIs have never embraced the file system because there is still a large group of techies who think the browser should be for browsing documents and not virtualizing apps (spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again). Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it? It's much easier for Google to store the data on their server so that everyone can access it instead of you setting up some god-awful FTP-or-whatever solution so that your wife can pull up the grocery list at the store. I'm hoping the new Chrome file system API will bring a new era of Web apps that respect the file system and allow you to e.g. load and save documents off your disk. However, this still won't be good enough for multiplayer apps, where many devices need to access the same content at the same time. I don't know if there is any real way we can go back to the P2P paradigm without destroying NAT - WebRTC tries but WebRTC itself resorts to server-based communication (TURN) when STUN fails.

smoldesu 5y ago
> The desktop is broken [...] because we stopped using files to represent information. This is it right here. Our entire world and notion of the internet is based on serving data stored in a file from one person to another. Once the developer started drawing too many conveniences and started to "move fast and break things", we thought it's good enough to just store everything in a database, or serve it as Javascript. These technologies are great, but they go completely against everything our computing paradigm stands for.
- megous 5y ago
  Nothing bad about storing a lot of stuff in the database, as long as it runs on my computer. :)
  - thomasahle 5y ago
    The file system is nice because it's the same database. I don't want all my programs to do their own database, since then how do I search and move stuff in bulk?
    - ehnto 5y ago
      A local database will store data in a file, but I get what you're saying. Files are a common interface that allow you to pipe data around, keep it portable and malleable.
    - megous 5y ago
      No, but all your programs can/could share the same database, and you could cross-reference anything whenever needed. At least that's how I manage it. I have a single postgresql database with per-program/per-instance schemas. I just did my taxes and figuring out what to pay was just a single select over some tables in the paypal and various per-bank schemas + a schema that had a table of currency conversion rates from our central bank applicable for each month of the year for tax purposes, expected by the tax man (or woman). Quick and easy. I don't even bother with UI, for these once or twice a year needs, just like I wouldn't bother with writing UI for some mp3 conversion task. Just a simple script will do. Filesystem is great for arbitrary data/files with no schema. Random pdf files, code, programs, etc. But anything that has some obvious schema and comes in large quantities and perhaps needs to be modified/synced with third party data source, I like having such things in the database. It's so much more useful that way, because it's much easier to do something with the data.
- onion2k 5y ago
  we thought it's good enough to just store everything in a database A filesystem is a database.
  - sjburt 5y ago
    Not only that, but a bad database.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Yes. One with a generic schema, and to which the user has full access rights. Fundamentally, it's not the files that make filesystem great. You could devise different models, perhaps a relational one, and paper complexity over with well-designed UIs. They'd probably still be more complex than the filesystem - files are about the simplest data storage abstraction you can invent[0] - but they'd be serviceable, and users would learn. What makes the filesystem great is that it's an old abstraction, designed in the ancient days back when computing was still about enabling users. Bicycles for the mind and all that. People cared about making things useful to users, instead of just shamelessly exploiting them. So, designed back then, the filesystem grants users the vocabulary to manage their data and freedom to do so, and it's so ingrained that - despite their best efforts - companies weren't able to completely take it away. Filesystem persists for the same reason e-mail persists. Despite its warts, it's one of those technologies made before the computing industry became exploitative. -- [0] - Despite the frequent claims to the contrary, coming from the web and mobile world. But guess what, data magically held in app and "shared" by magic isn't easier to understand, it's just not understood at all - users have no mental model for this. The mobile app approach works only because it removed all data management features except the share button.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    You are missing the point here by seeing only the technical aspect. You are misleading technical description with abstraction. A database is hardly if not accessible to the user. The files are an abstraction that enables the user to owns its data. Once you have a file, you can do more than opening it in your app. You can store it wherever you want, edit it with any software you wish, arrange it the way you are confortable with. As a user, you can’t do that with your SaaS database, you must rely on the « export / share » function of your SaaS provider, hoping it will export all data, in a readable format and that the import function exists and is reliable. You don’t own anything and as soon as you stop paying your subscription, you are stuck with nothing.
- zoomablemind 5y ago
  Perhaps the concept of file needs to evolve from a locally stored collection of bytes to a more generalized notion of locally identified collection of bytes, data links, and functional relations. All that should also have an ability of become fully localisable akin to 'clone'. By now the spectrum of interactions using computers is visible enough to be able to generalize such meta-file formats. Should it be some form of database or a kind of system-level support for defining and assembling such meta-files is a question of experimentation. It's more like an active-book paradigm vs a file, where one could tie together multiple contexts, yet being able to present it to user in some human perceivable form. Some analogies could be a project or an activity based collections of files, links, collaborations etc.
zozbot234 5y ago
> allow you to e.g. load and save documents off your disk. Isn't this trivial? A download button = "save" stuff from the app to disk. An upload button = "load" from disk to the app. AFAICT, webapps can already do this via existing file API's.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  This isn’t the same: download/upload can be used to simulate a file system, but they don’t preserve file identities in exactly the way open/read/write does.
Nursie 5y ago
> spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again I think in the world of app stores this is a little odd to argue. Native apps on the desktop do seem to be on the way out, but less so on tablet and mobile phone.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Most of my work is in native apps. It's just a better experience. The browser is great for communication, and it really shines for text based communication, but in my experience that's the only place where it outshines native apps. And remember, it's not like native apps can't back things up to the cloud, so there is a false dichotomy that you have to do everything in a browser that you want backed up to a cloud. I have no problem working with IntelliJ products and then pushing to a remote repo. My Photos, Music, etc are backed up to iCloud but aren't viewed in a browser either, etc. Zoom is launched with a browser link, but it opens a native app. MS Office has a cloud drive and is even sold as a service but I use the native Excel and Word rather than in-browser versions. I just don't see this migration to browser delivery for the apps I've been using.
- joeberon 5y ago
  It's 2021, people really aren't using the App Store like they used to, imo mainly due to the insane rise of subscription based applications for things as small as calculator apps
  - Nursie 5y ago
    > It's 2021, people really aren't using the App Store like they used to Got any figures on this decline?
hparadiz 5y ago
Ironically VSCode is a great example of a "web app" that does almost all of it's work on disk. To be fair others exist. Element (Riot.im) saves your backup keys to disk on demand. I agree. More of this please.
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  The best thing about "web apps" like that is that they're available on desktops that aren't Windows. ;)
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  I don't think that writing a native app using Electron qualifies it as a web app. VSCode is not normally used from the browser, it is downloaded and used more or less fully disconnected from the MS infrastructure you used to download it (give or take some plugin updates).
inter_netuser 5y ago
The great quality of iOS apps is a testament how good native apps really are vs whatever cross-platform nonsense being churned out today en masse. Maybe not the biggest factor, but the difference is certainly percievable.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I'd argue that in recent years, most people can't tell the difference between a native Swift app on iOS and a Kotlin app running on a midrange Android phone. I agree that Apple's approach is more technically correct here, but Android's approach is also pretty sustainable.
  - catblast01 5y ago
    I think those are both the native app targets of their respective platforms though? The Kotlin app targeting Android APIs is not cross platform. I gathered they were more drawing a comparison between native and some HTML/JS/CSS thing.
    - thu2111 5y ago
      Ah, so this takes us into the question of what "native" means. Some people use the word native to mean "the way apps were written in the 90s and on Apple platforms, still are written". It's short hand for manual memory management, full commitment to the operating system vendor's APIs, and so on. Apps written that way have some big advantages for end users - consistency, low memory usage, and so on. But they suck for developers. Manual memory management sucks, having your app market share be limited to the operating system's market share sucks, often the vendor APIs suck. Some people use the word "native" just to mean "uses the operating system specific APIs". The other aspects like being written in an AOT compiled manually memory managed language don't count. For those people Android apps written in Kotlin running on a JVM are native, but the other people, not so much.
pedalpete 5y ago
There is lots of good thoughts in your argument, but I disagree with the "should save their information to disk". This may make sense for technical people with a specific goal, but for most users, they shouldn't care where it is saved, ala dropbox. They just want to access their files. Online, offline, everywhere, that's what they want.
- dwaltrip 5y ago
  It would be nice if they didn’t have to care where the information is stored. And maybe that is the case 90% of the time. But that other 10% matters a lot and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > but for most users, they shouldn't care where it is saved, ala dropbox. They just want to access their files. Yes, but it does matter where it's saved, because the location and method confers ownership of the data. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law" is the rule of modern Internet. It shouldn't matter whether my photos live on my drive or in a third party's cloud, but it does - because in the cloud setting, the company dictates what I can and cannot do with my data, can pull shenanigans like applying strong lossy compression to uploaded photos, and they will eventually take my access away - either I cross the ever-expanding terms of service somehow, or they'll just go out of business. In my experience of both managing my own data and helping non-tech people, filesystem vs. cloud data durability is really a wash. People seem just as likely to lose their local data due to drive failure or accidental deletion, as they are to lose access to the cloud storage (or have the company disappear from under them).
- CRConrad 5y ago
  The bit you're disagreeing with is the good thought of their argument.
KronisLV 5y ago
> Well, for one, social media companies don't want you to save stuff locally, because they can't serve ads with local content. This i do not understand - mobile and web content has easily been monetized for a long time now, why would desktop software be any different? For example, i use software called RaiDrive for mapping network drives on Windows (https://www.raidrive.com/ https://www.raidrive.com/). In their free version, they show ads on the main app window after you open it. Why isn't this the norm on desktop - ad supported but free software? Why aren't there ad networks for desktop apps like there are for mobile apps and web content?
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I don't understand why either, but I'm so glad it isn't the norm there, it's still one of the big benefits of desktop IMO.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  How would Facebook guarantee you use their app to look at their stuff? If the answer is "some proprietary format that only the app can read" then what's the point?
- imiric 5y ago
  > Why aren't there ad networks for desktop apps like there are for mobile apps and web content? Good lord, please, no. Desktop adware should remain a bad dream from the 90s and early 2000s. It ruined software like Opera, and was often bundled with spyware. I'm glad advertisers mostly embraced the web, where I can run their code relatively sandboxed and easily block it. A desktop app has much less restrictions over the resources it can access, so allowing software that actively wants to track and manipulate you to run in that environment doesn't seem like a good idea. The fact it was acceptable in the 90s with the complete lack of security of the popular OSs of the era is a bit nutty, and while modern OSs are much more secure, I still wouldn't run anything ad supported. F/LOSS or paid apps only for everything under my control. Subscriptions are tolerable in some cases.
  - Marsymars 5y ago
GekkePrutser 5y ago
> this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again I agree with your post in general but not this. I see a lot more interest in self-hosting stuff lately, precisely because of the concern you mention that online services do ads and tracking. More and more people seem to be doing this. And I personally really prefer native apps over web apps or electron stuff.
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  When self hosting is as easy (for your grandma who likes cats) as downloading a container from the Windows Store and double clicking it to open, install and start the server. Then we've truly made leaps and strides in fixing centralization. Self hosting is hard because ops is hard [1]. People aren't yet in the mentality that you should provide an official modular deployment every time you provide a server binary. Everything-as-a-container wouldn't be the worst way to take the desktop [2]. Isn't that kind of how Apps work on OS X? [1]: The ironic part is that most people don't keep anything long enough for a hard drive or any other component to fail anymore. So the argument about the cloud abstracting away the physical hardware maintenance for every day consumers like yourself or I is ... dubious. [2]: Yes.. I just spent the weekend learning nix-build. Goodness, it's super easy to container all the things! :) I'm feeling like a zealot when I start using nix to do what I could have done with a zip file. But there's something magic to having a zip file of assets with its own shell.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    True, I was mainly thinking about the HN community (and the more technical people around me) instead. This is not for my grandma who likes cats (PS: So do I!) Yes this is kinda how apps work on macOS, but not all apps yet. The new sandboxed container model isn't mandatory yet. Some apps are just a folder of files with no kind of containerisation at all (other than the .app itself being a folder rather than a file). More modern apps store all their data in a containerised filesystem though. It leads to some cool things you can do like easily capturing the icon of an app or even changing it without having to change the app itself. But on the self-hosting side, docker is making big strides there. Almost everyone deploying something like Home Assistant for example will do it through a tree of managed docker containers, in many cases without even knowing it :) It comes with a supervisor (which is also dockerised) which manages that part very well. I think most consumers I know keep their computers for long enough by the way.. Phones come and go, but desktops and even laptops tend to stick around until they do break and I can't fix them anymore or just heave a sigh and go like "NO this time you really have to get a new one, Windows Vista hasn't been supported for years"
mejutoco 5y ago
While I agree with the argument, Figma allows you to save to disk.
- nexuist 5y ago
  This is true, and an oversight on my part. I suppose what I meant to say is that more web apps should be like Figma.
salawat 5y ago
>spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again) Not with that attitude it won't. Yeah. 90% of tech offerings only work based on monetization and hostage taking of consumer data. Normal people are starting to pick up on this. All the techbros looking to score that hot, sweet -aaS money are blind to it and desperately hoping their market dominance and spend can keep people from digging through the native computing stack. Need end to end encrypted file transfer? VPN and NFS is your friend. Need chat? IRC, at your service. Also exposable through VPN, so you can limit the audience. Want Doc updates where your secrets and in progress stuff is guaranteed to not get pored over by some intern or Admin somewhere? See above. Want no bloody ads and not to be snooped on? Set that stuff up homey. I've got a young'un whose mind is blown away at the fact games used to even exist that didn't need n internet connection. The desktop metaphor is fine. What isn't fine is the normal person's technical education/on ramping. The old approach was teach programs first, then the protocols and problem classes they solve. Now it seems to stop at just teaching programs, because there is so much out there that is doing the same exact thing, but different branding, there's never enough time to dig into what is going on under the covers.
- zzo38computer 5y ago
  I use IRC; it is good. I also use NNTP is also good. There are other protocols can be good too. They can be good for different purposes. There is also I can store all of the files on my own computer. I don't need to store them elsewhere, except to make backups. I use DVDs for local private backups. For public files, I also store them on DVDs, but also on other internet services (such as chiselapp), too. There are many computer games that don't need internet connection. Some of them, but not all of them, are designed for older computer systems such as NES/Famicom, which can be emulated on many computers, so it doesn't matter what operating system you are on, it will likely work. Better documentation is helpful. Describe the program, the protocols, file formats, etc. This is how to learn working with computer. Other programs doing same kind of things can differ in many more ways other than only the branding though; some have different features, source code availability, etc.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  Need chat? IRC, at your service. Just.. no. Please stop pushing IRC. It's had decades to evolve and still today lacks really basic QoL things like a good mobile story (always-on connections won't fly, bouncers are limited hacks), permissions, or user registration that doesn't look like an 80s xterm. Matrix is carrying that torch now. IRC is an evolutionary dead-end that will only ever be used by techies.
andrepd 5y ago
> (spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again) Ahaha, I don't touch web apps unless I really really have to. And even then it's lighter stuff, like chats. Can you imagine using an actual productivity application in the browser?? No thanks. The thought that Slack/Ms Teams/Discord all run slower than MSN Messenger did in 2005 despite my having a computer ~50x more powerful is depressing enough (and each of them consuming as much RAM as I had on my desktop back in the day!).
- oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  > Can you imagine using an actual productivity application in the browser? I'm not sure what type of applications you're referring to, but if you're including word processing in that, then I can't imagine not using either Google Docs, or whatever might one day come along and be a reasonable alternative. If I'm using a word processor, it's because I want someone else to be able to read and, quite often, contribute to what I'm creating. That is far, far less painful using Google Docs than Pages or whatever the alternative might be.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    I mean things like: Photoshop, Blender, video editing software, MuseScore, Ableton, etc. And of course, text editors / IDEs :P > If I'm using a word processor, it's because I want someone else to be able to read and, quite often, contribute to what I'm creating. Well, the vast majority of things I write, I write by myself. When I have to collaborate I (begrudgingly :)) use Overleaf / Google Docs.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      Isn't VS Code the most popular IDE currently?
      - SilverRed 5y ago
        Most likely. It's not the best IDE but it is likely the best free one. Out of the box VS Code is pretty much good to go while others are either paid or take a lot of config. I have attempted to use vim but I just can't be bothered working out how to turn it in to VS code. If I have to decide between multiple ways to install plugins with their own tradeoffs, its already too much work when vs code just works.
beckman466 5y ago
> I don't know if there is any real way we can go back to the P2P paradigm Have you heard out The holochain framework?
zzo38computer 5y ago
Yes, I want to save the files locally to the disk. I don't use Figma, Slack, Notion, Facebook, Twitter (except sometimes for reading, using Nitter), or Google Docs. You could save the HTML, but that isn't always ideal. Having defined file formats can help, which is the case when using email, NNTP, ActivityPub, IRC, etc. FTP is no good. There are better protocols, such as HTTP, Gopher, Gemini, Plan9, etc. I had made up a file format for serving directory listings by HTTP (but I don't know how to configure Apache, or to write an extension for Apache, to be able to use it). About "who think the browser should be for browsing documents and not virtualizing apps", it is badly designed for virtualizing apps. (I have thought of some better ways.) Also, the file system paradigm does not fail with shared content; you could have the program to mount a remote file system and then access it using local programs, if wanted. (You can then also easily to copy files between your computer and remotely, in this way, by using the standard operating system commands for doing so, and will work just as well with command-line or GUI. Similarly, for SQL databases, you can have an extension to expose remote data as a virtual table, and you can then easily copy data between locally and remotely.)
- yzmtf2008 5y ago
  > you could have the program to mount a remote file system and then access it using local programs, if wanted Sounds good. Where is such program? This is surely not a very novel idea, but where is it? Hint: - remote file systems suck. see: sshfs - the feature set you think are important are maybe not important enough to that many people
  - john-aj 5y ago
    sshfs sucks, sure, but there are other file system protocols. Plan 9's 9fs is pretty cool.
  - systoll 5y ago
    Not that I disagree with your overall point, but there are multiple products in that space. It's clearly not a deal-breaker for most; but if anyone's lamenting the lack of a GoogleDocsFS, they can get one: https://mountainduck.io https://mountainduck.io https://cloudmounter.net https://cloudmounter.net https://www.expandrive.com/desktop/ https://www.expandrive.com/desktop/ https://github.com/pranavmk98/gDocsFS https://github.com/pranavmk98/gDocsFS
jen20 5y ago
I for one want nothing to do with this. File system access is for good actors only, and the advertising assholes have poisoned the well for a web browser being anything other than a dumb document browser with the privacy settings turned up to the max for me.
- MikeUt 5y ago
  > File system access How about just subfolder access? Limit facebook.com's permissions to only the user/facebook/ folder.
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    How about just anonymous file descriptors. It asks for a file, the user gives it one or they don't. It can't make any use of any filenames whatsoever.
    - zzo38computer 5y ago
      That can be a better idea. (Unfortunately the HTML file input in any web browser that I have tried does not allow the user to change the file name to a different name than the local file name. This ought to be fixed.) When it asks the user for a file, can also specify the wanted access: read, write, read+seek, or read+write+seek. Requested format can also be specified, but the user should be allowed to ignore the requested format if wanted and instead specify an arbitrary file. For writes, estimated file size can also be specified as a hint, which can also be ignored. Then the user can type in a file name, or for the non-seeking modes, a pipe is also possible. For write non-seeking, the user can specify append or overwrite. For seekable files, a pipe is not valid. For writing to files, the user can also optionally specify the maximum size that the file is allowed to have.
  - fragileone 5y ago
    That's basically what file system access is like in Android, unless you give an app Storage permission. Seems sandboxed enough if no other web apps can view it.
fukmbas 5y ago
The reality is we don't even need these systems you're talking about...
rexreed 5y ago
We are living in a multi-device, instant-access, access-anywhere, cloud-based world, and the desktop file-based paradigm has trouble with this reality. The vast majority of non-technical people would struggle with desktop-based files when they want everything everywhere all the time on every device at any moment.
- lc9er 5y ago
  Is that what they want, though? Most people that work an office job, at least, still deal with Excel, Word, and Outlook. Maybe they’ll setup work email on their phone, but that’s probably it. I’ve noticed a pushback (true for myself, too) ever since the push from work-supplied devices to BYOD.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    People are realizing mixing private and work communications on the same device is a bad idea. The kicker is, this isn't even some kind of corporate conspiracy. It's just human nature - if you hook up your business e-mail to your private phone, you are going to be checking it after work hours, you will start responding to e-mails, and your work habits will shift to account for that. That's why I just don't do that first step. The only connection between my current smartphone and my work is some TOTP keys in the authenticator app, to enable more convenient login to some cloud services the employer makes us use. I talked with a co-worker recently, who made the mistake of installing work communications on their personal smartphone, and they very much regret it - not because the company is exploiting it, but because they can't discipline themselves to not check business messages after work.
crossroadsguy 5y ago
It’s the same reason I utterly dislike Standard Notes. It has no local files (that’s a must for a note taking app).
- hanche 5y ago
  That depends what you mean by local files: On the Mac, at least, it will keep local backups. See the Backups menu item. Admittedly, the backups are not in a convenient format, rather being json files containing encrypted blobs. But there is a utility for decrypting all the files. So if you are merely worried about losing access, you're covered. So long as you don't lose your password, that is. But for sure, other solutions work better if you have less stringent security requirements.
kodablah 5y ago
> don't know if there is any real way we can go back to the P2P paradigm without destroying NAT I think it's time for NAT to go for residential ipv6 and the numbers I've seen show that TURN isn't required for most connections. Unfortunately universities and businesses will probably never remove NAT as there is limited incentive to do so. I think the best we can do is have somewhat decentralized networks with limited yet trusted centralized authorities (the need for discoverability will always remain, even when using otherwise decentralized networks like SSB). This could be IPFS with bootstrap nodes for their DHT, or as I have been using to circumvent NAT when latency is unimportant, Tor directory authority to host ephemeral, local onion services.
nobody_nothing 5y ago
> Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it? Just curious, does anyone know of any hybrid file formats that store information both locally and online? It seems like one solution to this problem would be a document that stores an editable copy locally and a revision hash in its metadata, then decides whether to serve up the local or cloud copy depending on whether the user is connected to the internet. Sure, this could cause conflicts between online / cloud files if someone else edits the file at the same time as you, but that's true of any cloud sync service like iOS Notes. I guess in retrospect I'm just describing Dropbox which, while it's more a container for standard files than a file format in itself, has largely the same effect.
- thu2111 5y ago
  Yes, filesystem sync protocols like rsync do it at the FS level and if you want to go deeper than the FS level, you get into the realm of operational transform and other rather complex algorithms. A very insightful comment up thread observes that filesystem-centric computing worked for as long as collaboration was very limited. Once apps needed to move beyond that to collaboration at a finer grained level it fell apart and apps started needing databases, and in particular, databases that could link data from different users together, implying a shared privacy domain. Was this change inevitable? The long since exiled and forgotten Hans Reiser wrote about this problem a lot back in the day (he murdered his wife and obviously his ideas lost any traction at that point). His thesis predated a lot of the concerns about privacy and central control that we see today, but briefly, he argued a part of why this was happening was that filesystem technology was not good enough because it couldn't handle very small files and because POSIX had some unnecessary limitations. Due to this lack, apps were constantly forced to invent filesystem-within-a-file formats, e.g. OLE2 and OpenDoc were both centred around this concept, SQLite obviously is one too, ZIP yes, but really most file formats can be viewed as a collection of small files within a file. The idea was, if you upgrade filesystem tech, you can radically change how apps are written. The problem is that operating system tech on servers and desktops has been stagnant for years. Microsoft and Apple lost interest in their primary operating systems and the open source world has never really been interested in going beyond 1970s design ideas, largely because cloning and adding small elaborations to commercial designs is the way the community stays unified. Look at the mass hysteria that followed systemd, which is one of the only upgrades to the core UNIX OS design patterns in decades. Actually making changes to the core of POSIX isn't something that's going to come out of that community. It'll probably take some company that wants to innovate on the core ideas again.
syrrim 5y ago
I have trouble believing that this is the fault of the techie lobby, considering that said lobby otherwise has no meaningful accomplishments under its belt. My explanation would be that the web is massively successful because it enables user to navigate safely without being in danger of leaking their files. If a user isn't willing to install an app to do a task, it is precisely because they fear that such an app will be able to do unknown damage to their computer. Allowing the same thing of web apps eliminates their advantage and endangers users.
skohan 5y ago
It's not only ads. Autodesk I believe does online rendering now, and for most CAD drawings even a cheap APU can handle that level of geometry, but it's harder to justify a recurring revenue model for a fully local application.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > it's harder to justify a recurring revenue model for a fully local application. Then don't. Software was plenty profitable when we were just selling licenses.
slver 5y ago
You can put url shortcuts on your desktop. Also Figma is part of a terrible trend and I hate this crap as a web dev.
- VladimirGolovin 5y ago
  As someone who has been designing stuff in native file-based apps for 30 years, I consider Figma a godsend -- because of their collaboration / multiplayer features. And I don't miss files at all, though of course I understand that I do not control my data stored in Figma.
  - slver 5y ago
    It points to the need for native software to allow collaboration and this is actually happening slowly. I still hate Figma though. It's too primitive and I'm sick of being given Figma links where the necessary resources are 50% chance not isolated, or not vector, or not exposed at all.
amyjess 5y ago
I'm not really sure how Slack saving documents to disk would really make sense. IRC was around before SaaS took off and webapps replaced desktop apps, but I can't think of a client that implemented "IRC documents" saved to disk. Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format, and you didn't open them with your IRC client. Hell, you couldn't open them with your IRC client. There's no reason you can't just ctrl-C a bunch of stuff out of a Slack chat and ctrl-V it into your text editor. Only difference between that and IRC logging is that you have to do it manually.
- enriquto 5y ago
  > they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format Of course they are! Using anything other than text files to store chat logs would be idiotic. The main point is that slack is a user-hostile application that does not even allow you to do that. Why people put up with this is beyond me.
- nexuist 5y ago
  > Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. Right, my point is why doesn't Slack do that? Then you could use `grep` or `find` to search across all your messages and avoid paying a monthly fee to access your entire message history and...oh, right.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    You can only search a log for the time that you were logged in and saving it. You can search the entire history of many Slack channels from the very first message posted in it onwards, even before you'd ever joined it. That's a significant advantage over a local file. I'm not particularly keen on Slack but suggesting search would be better locally is plain silly. Search is obviously better done at the server.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
titzer 5y ago
> (spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again) Oh god, please, no. I don't really understand the disconnect between your love of filesystems and yet disdain for native apps. The exact same arguments apply; can't serve ads locally, don't autoupdate (a feature! they rot slower), can access any time, don't need a network. Why would you want a webapp? Because it has flashier animations and SVG? There's a long conversation to be had about this, but the summary is no, no, god no, please give me back my native applications with drop-down menus and boring file picker dialogs. As long as they have decent keyboard shortcuts, I'll manage.
- joeberon 5y ago
  Who said they disdain native apps? They simply believe that web apps have/will continue to take over. You aren't going to get back native applications for every product just because you prefer it or that to you it is better. There are factors more powerful than that which are determining that web apps are more suitable. For example: ability to serve ads, autoupdate, AB testing, tracking Maybe those things are bad for you but are they bad for the people who make the product? No, they're pretty good things for the company, maybe even expected in 2021. Your preference against those things doesn't change that fact
Krasnol 5y ago
Those social media contents you've listed there is nothing anybody wants to keep. Let's be real here. This is throwaway information. While outside of the edgy cool startup bubble the rest of the professional information is still being saved somewhere. Sometimes even saved AND printed. No matter if it was on Slack, Teams or wherever.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > Those social media contents you've listed there is nothing anybody wants to keep. I do. It's a chunk of my life. These are memories. Much like a paper journal and paper letters I may have been writing instead.
bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
For the record, Apple’s office suite apps have no problem with multiple people collaborating on files that they have on disk
mch82 5y ago
Here’s an interesting example of an app that runs in browser and opens/saves SQLite GeoPackage files on the computer running the browser instead of a remote server. https://ngageoint.github.io/geopackage-js/ https://ngageoint.github.io/geopackage-js/
f1refly 5y ago
> this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again I don't see this. The native program ecosystem is alive and well as far as I'm concerned. All the programs on my computers are native, despite noone "going back". > Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it? It's much easier for Google to store the data on their server so that everyone can access it instead of you setting up some god-awful FTP-or-whatever solution so that your wife can pull up the grocery list at the store. Now go and check out syncthing, you're in for a really good time.
magpi3 5y ago
I keep repeating this argument in different forums, but: if you every lived in China you would realize that the native app is the past and the future. Since governments can block websites, that means they can block your web apps too. When I came to China I completely lost access to Google Docs, Gmail, Facebook, etc. Relying on web apps is exactly like giving governments the right to uninstall applications on your computer. Right now this is not a big deal in most countries. Right now. But as the web becomes increasingly balkanized (and I believe it will) and as countries become less democratic (always a possibility) the native app with local data will reassert its prominence in people's lives.
- ggk 5y ago
  > Relying on web apps is exactly like giving governments the right to uninstall applications on your computer. To some extent, governments, across the globe, are already exercising this right in some form. Quite often we hear that some government has banned some app and it becomes illegal to use that app in that country.
- SiVal 5y ago
  This is an important point, but then "native" iOS has the same vulnerability. Apple arguably has more power to block iOS apps than China has to block the Web, so China just tells Apple to block what they want blocked, and Apple does it.
  - cosmojg 5y ago
    If it makes you feel better, efforts are being made to bring non-tyrannical operating systems to mobile in a braindead-easy, consumer-friendly fashion. You can search up loads of articles about the amazing stuff that the peeps running organizations like Pine64 and LineageOS have been up to. I'm carefully optimistic!
frobisher 5y ago
Some other reasons for saving files in the cloud not mentioned: - lets you access them cross-device more easily (replicating the files on each device could be could, but uploading to the cloud seems easier); - backup, in case my device breaks or is lost
pjmlp 5y ago
> this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again Mobile phones, tablets and IoT native apps say Hello.
CPLNTN 5y ago
Considering how messy the author is, all those files you mentioned would just end up in his download folder.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Yeah, well, it's not 100 % his fault. Browsers should default to "Ask every time" for download file location, in stead of just bunging everything into a default "Downloads" folder. But that's really fucking easy to change, so still 90 % his fault. (Or 95, 99...?)
MaxBarraclough 5y ago
> we stopped using files to represent information. Figma, Slack, and Notion should save their information to disk. You should be able to open a Notion document, or a Figma design, from your desktop A good observation, but I think it conflates two different trends: 1. Some software platforms deliberately limit what data is stored on your local machine under your control 2. There's been a shift in UI/UX away from using files as a first-class abstraction There's a good case to be made that a UI should generally hide the specifics of its data storage. As an example, it's a good thing that most email clients present the user with their emails, rather than with a raw folder of files. (Internally, the email client might make use of a database rather than a directory, so it might make good back-end sense too.) Of course, that's not the same thing as the email client being hostile to data-portability. iOS strongly commits to this ideal, even at the expense of constraining user actions. The podcast app doesn't let you upload your downloaded podcast episodes to your desktop computer, for instance. Aside: iOS has very poor support for dealing with files in the usual ways, to the point that you pretty much need to use a third-party app to do so. I've found the freeware Documents app by Readdle to be very good for this. > this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again I agree that the web as a GUI toolkit is here to stay, but native apps are alive and well too. There's a trend to try to push users off the mobile web and onto native apps (Facebook, Gmail, reddit), rather than the other way round.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
> this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again This snippet has really lit the touchpaper. A long time ago, I predicted that the world was course to deliver insta-compiled applications through a browser, as though we'd have a Visual Basic runtime environment plugin. However, we're now there, essentially, with XHR and many-megabyte JS bundles, manipulating the DOM through the browser's "widget" engine. There's really a tipping point for each application, where the application's functionality determines where it is better served. For instance, no one's going to make a web app out of Logic Pro any time soon. However, if someone comes up with a stateful protocol to implement in current browsers, then that tipping point flips to the web for a whole bunch of applications.
passivate 5y ago
I work in biotech and our business would cease to exist without access to native apps. So would many other businesses in many other industries.
baxuz 5y ago
Not just that. We have a lot more metadata these days and not everything can be a file. If you keep all the metadata and database-like files accessible to the user, how do you handle store corruption? EG, a video recording/playback app that allows the user to save bookmarks/timestamps. You'd need to have some place to store those bookmarks, extract frames, generate multiple resolutions for both the video and frames (for gallery previews etc), possibly add some more metadata... It's much easier to hide the actual files from the user and give them the option to export the data in some user-readable format. Apple is notorious for this. Everything is a soup of folders and files with hashes and .plist files. Similar story with iOS and Android.

smoldesu 5y ago

> The desktop is broken [...] because we stopped using files to represent information. This is it right here. Our entire world and notion of the internet is based on serving data stored in a file from one person to another. Once the developer started drawing too many conveniences and started to "move fast and break things", we thought it's good enough to just store everything in a database, or serve it as Javascript. These technologies are great, but they go completely against everything our computing paradigm stands for.

megous 5y ago
Nothing bad about storing a lot of stuff in the database, as long as it runs on my computer. :)
- thomasahle 5y ago
  The file system is nice because it's the same database. I don't want all my programs to do their own database, since then how do I search and move stuff in bulk?
  - ehnto 5y ago
    A local database will store data in a file, but I get what you're saying. Files are a common interface that allow you to pipe data around, keep it portable and malleable.
  - megous 5y ago
    No, but all your programs can/could share the same database, and you could cross-reference anything whenever needed. At least that's how I manage it. I have a single postgresql database with per-program/per-instance schemas. I just did my taxes and figuring out what to pay was just a single select over some tables in the paypal and various per-bank schemas + a schema that had a table of currency conversion rates from our central bank applicable for each month of the year for tax purposes, expected by the tax man (or woman). Quick and easy. I don't even bother with UI, for these once or twice a year needs, just like I wouldn't bother with writing UI for some mp3 conversion task. Just a simple script will do. Filesystem is great for arbitrary data/files with no schema. Random pdf files, code, programs, etc. But anything that has some obvious schema and comes in large quantities and perhaps needs to be modified/synced with third party data source, I like having such things in the database. It's so much more useful that way, because it's much easier to do something with the data.
onion2k 5y ago
we thought it's good enough to just store everything in a database A filesystem is a database.
- sjburt 5y ago
  Not only that, but a bad database.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Yes. One with a generic schema, and to which the user has full access rights. Fundamentally, it's not the files that make filesystem great. You could devise different models, perhaps a relational one, and paper complexity over with well-designed UIs. They'd probably still be more complex than the filesystem - files are about the simplest data storage abstraction you can invent[0] - but they'd be serviceable, and users would learn. What makes the filesystem great is that it's an old abstraction, designed in the ancient days back when computing was still about enabling users. Bicycles for the mind and all that. People cared about making things useful to users, instead of just shamelessly exploiting them. So, designed back then, the filesystem grants users the vocabulary to manage their data and freedom to do so, and it's so ingrained that - despite their best efforts - companies weren't able to completely take it away. Filesystem persists for the same reason e-mail persists. Despite its warts, it's one of those technologies made before the computing industry became exploitative. -- [0] - Despite the frequent claims to the contrary, coming from the web and mobile world. But guess what, data magically held in app and "shared" by magic isn't easier to understand, it's just not understood at all - users have no mental model for this. The mobile app approach works only because it removed all data management features except the share button.
- pjerem 5y ago
  You are missing the point here by seeing only the technical aspect. You are misleading technical description with abstraction. A database is hardly if not accessible to the user. The files are an abstraction that enables the user to owns its data. Once you have a file, you can do more than opening it in your app. You can store it wherever you want, edit it with any software you wish, arrange it the way you are confortable with. As a user, you can’t do that with your SaaS database, you must rely on the « export / share » function of your SaaS provider, hoping it will export all data, in a readable format and that the import function exists and is reliable. You don’t own anything and as soon as you stop paying your subscription, you are stuck with nothing.
zoomablemind 5y ago
Perhaps the concept of file needs to evolve from a locally stored collection of bytes to a more generalized notion of locally identified collection of bytes, data links, and functional relations. All that should also have an ability of become fully localisable akin to 'clone'. By now the spectrum of interactions using computers is visible enough to be able to generalize such meta-file formats. Should it be some form of database or a kind of system-level support for defining and assembling such meta-files is a question of experimentation. It's more like an active-book paradigm vs a file, where one could tie together multiple contexts, yet being able to present it to user in some human perceivable form. Some analogies could be a project or an activity based collections of files, links, collaborations etc.

zozbot234 5y ago

> allow you to e.g. load and save documents off your disk. Isn't this trivial? A download button = "save" stuff from the app to disk. An upload button = "load" from disk to the app. AFAICT, webapps can already do this via existing file API's.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
This isn’t the same: download/upload can be used to simulate a file system, but they don’t preserve file identities in exactly the way open/read/write does.

Nursie 5y ago

> spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again I think in the world of app stores this is a little odd to argue. Native apps on the desktop do seem to be on the way out, but less so on tablet and mobile phone.

rsj_hn 5y ago
Most of my work is in native apps. It's just a better experience. The browser is great for communication, and it really shines for text based communication, but in my experience that's the only place where it outshines native apps. And remember, it's not like native apps can't back things up to the cloud, so there is a false dichotomy that you have to do everything in a browser that you want backed up to a cloud. I have no problem working with IntelliJ products and then pushing to a remote repo. My Photos, Music, etc are backed up to iCloud but aren't viewed in a browser either, etc. Zoom is launched with a browser link, but it opens a native app. MS Office has a cloud drive and is even sold as a service but I use the native Excel and Word rather than in-browser versions. I just don't see this migration to browser delivery for the apps I've been using.
joeberon 5y ago
It's 2021, people really aren't using the App Store like they used to, imo mainly due to the insane rise of subscription based applications for things as small as calculator apps
- Nursie 5y ago
  > It's 2021, people really aren't using the App Store like they used to Got any figures on this decline?

hparadiz 5y ago

Ironically VSCode is a great example of a "web app" that does almost all of it's work on disk. To be fair others exist. Element (Riot.im) saves your backup keys to disk on demand. I agree. More of this please.

shrimp_emoji 5y ago
The best thing about "web apps" like that is that they're available on desktops that aren't Windows. ;)
tsimionescu 5y ago
I don't think that writing a native app using Electron qualifies it as a web app. VSCode is not normally used from the browser, it is downloaded and used more or less fully disconnected from the MS infrastructure you used to download it (give or take some plugin updates).

inter_netuser 5y ago

The great quality of iOS apps is a testament how good native apps really are vs whatever cross-platform nonsense being churned out today en masse. Maybe not the biggest factor, but the difference is certainly percievable.

smoldesu 5y ago
I'd argue that in recent years, most people can't tell the difference between a native Swift app on iOS and a Kotlin app running on a midrange Android phone. I agree that Apple's approach is more technically correct here, but Android's approach is also pretty sustainable.
- catblast01 5y ago
  I think those are both the native app targets of their respective platforms though? The Kotlin app targeting Android APIs is not cross platform. I gathered they were more drawing a comparison between native and some HTML/JS/CSS thing.
  - thu2111 5y ago
    Ah, so this takes us into the question of what "native" means. Some people use the word native to mean "the way apps were written in the 90s and on Apple platforms, still are written". It's short hand for manual memory management, full commitment to the operating system vendor's APIs, and so on. Apps written that way have some big advantages for end users - consistency, low memory usage, and so on. But they suck for developers. Manual memory management sucks, having your app market share be limited to the operating system's market share sucks, often the vendor APIs suck. Some people use the word "native" just to mean "uses the operating system specific APIs". The other aspects like being written in an AOT compiled manually memory managed language don't count. For those people Android apps written in Kotlin running on a JVM are native, but the other people, not so much.

pedalpete 5y ago

There is lots of good thoughts in your argument, but I disagree with the "should save their information to disk". This may make sense for technical people with a specific goal, but for most users, they shouldn't care where it is saved, ala dropbox. They just want to access their files. Online, offline, everywhere, that's what they want.

dwaltrip 5y ago
It would be nice if they didn’t have to care where the information is stored. And maybe that is the case 90% of the time. But that other 10% matters a lot and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> but for most users, they shouldn't care where it is saved, ala dropbox. They just want to access their files. Yes, but it does matter where it's saved, because the location and method confers ownership of the data. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law" is the rule of modern Internet. It shouldn't matter whether my photos live on my drive or in a third party's cloud, but it does - because in the cloud setting, the company dictates what I can and cannot do with my data, can pull shenanigans like applying strong lossy compression to uploaded photos, and they will eventually take my access away - either I cross the ever-expanding terms of service somehow, or they'll just go out of business. In my experience of both managing my own data and helping non-tech people, filesystem vs. cloud data durability is really a wash. People seem just as likely to lose their local data due to drive failure or accidental deletion, as they are to lose access to the cloud storage (or have the company disappear from under them).
CRConrad 5y ago
The bit you're disagreeing with is the good thought of their argument.

KronisLV 5y ago

> Well, for one, social media companies don't want you to save stuff locally, because they can't serve ads with local content. This i do not understand - mobile and web content has easily been monetized for a long time now, why would desktop software be any different? For example, i use software called RaiDrive for mapping network drives on Windows (https://www.raidrive.com/ https://www.raidrive.com/). In their free version, they show ads on the main app window after you open it. Why isn't this the norm on desktop - ad supported but free software? Why aren't there ad networks for desktop apps like there are for mobile apps and web content?

GekkePrutser 5y ago
I don't understand why either, but I'm so glad it isn't the norm there, it's still one of the big benefits of desktop IMO.
emodendroket 5y ago
How would Facebook guarantee you use their app to look at their stuff? If the answer is "some proprietary format that only the app can read" then what's the point?
imiric 5y ago
> Why aren't there ad networks for desktop apps like there are for mobile apps and web content? Good lord, please, no. Desktop adware should remain a bad dream from the 90s and early 2000s. It ruined software like Opera, and was often bundled with spyware. I'm glad advertisers mostly embraced the web, where I can run their code relatively sandboxed and easily block it. A desktop app has much less restrictions over the resources it can access, so allowing software that actively wants to track and manipulate you to run in that environment doesn't seem like a good idea. The fact it was acceptable in the 90s with the complete lack of security of the popular OSs of the era is a bit nutty, and while modern OSs are much more secure, I still wouldn't run anything ad supported. F/LOSS or paid apps only for everything under my control. Subscriptions are tolerable in some cases.
- Marsymars 5y ago

GekkePrutser 5y ago

> this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again I agree with your post in general but not this. I see a lot more interest in self-hosting stuff lately, precisely because of the concern you mention that online services do ads and tracking. More and more people seem to be doing this. And I personally really prefer native apps over web apps or electron stuff.

aetherspawn 5y ago
When self hosting is as easy (for your grandma who likes cats) as downloading a container from the Windows Store and double clicking it to open, install and start the server. Then we've truly made leaps and strides in fixing centralization. Self hosting is hard because ops is hard [1]. People aren't yet in the mentality that you should provide an official modular deployment every time you provide a server binary. Everything-as-a-container wouldn't be the worst way to take the desktop [2]. Isn't that kind of how Apps work on OS X? [1]: The ironic part is that most people don't keep anything long enough for a hard drive or any other component to fail anymore. So the argument about the cloud abstracting away the physical hardware maintenance for every day consumers like yourself or I is ... dubious. [2]: Yes.. I just spent the weekend learning nix-build. Goodness, it's super easy to container all the things! :) I'm feeling like a zealot when I start using nix to do what I could have done with a zip file. But there's something magic to having a zip file of assets with its own shell.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  True, I was mainly thinking about the HN community (and the more technical people around me) instead. This is not for my grandma who likes cats (PS: So do I!) Yes this is kinda how apps work on macOS, but not all apps yet. The new sandboxed container model isn't mandatory yet. Some apps are just a folder of files with no kind of containerisation at all (other than the .app itself being a folder rather than a file). More modern apps store all their data in a containerised filesystem though. It leads to some cool things you can do like easily capturing the icon of an app or even changing it without having to change the app itself. But on the self-hosting side, docker is making big strides there. Almost everyone deploying something like Home Assistant for example will do it through a tree of managed docker containers, in many cases without even knowing it :) It comes with a supervisor (which is also dockerised) which manages that part very well. I think most consumers I know keep their computers for long enough by the way.. Phones come and go, but desktops and even laptops tend to stick around until they do break and I can't fix them anymore or just heave a sigh and go like "NO this time you really have to get a new one, Windows Vista hasn't been supported for years"

mejutoco 5y ago

While I agree with the argument, Figma allows you to save to disk.

nexuist 5y ago
This is true, and an oversight on my part. I suppose what I meant to say is that more web apps should be like Figma.

salawat 5y ago

>spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again) Not with that attitude it won't. Yeah. 90% of tech offerings only work based on monetization and hostage taking of consumer data. Normal people are starting to pick up on this. All the techbros looking to score that hot, sweet -aaS money are blind to it and desperately hoping their market dominance and spend can keep people from digging through the native computing stack. Need end to end encrypted file transfer? VPN and NFS is your friend. Need chat? IRC, at your service. Also exposable through VPN, so you can limit the audience. Want Doc updates where your secrets and in progress stuff is guaranteed to not get pored over by some intern or Admin somewhere? See above. Want no bloody ads and not to be snooped on? Set that stuff up homey. I've got a young'un whose mind is blown away at the fact games used to even exist that didn't need n internet connection. The desktop metaphor is fine. What isn't fine is the normal person's technical education/on ramping. The old approach was teach programs first, then the protocols and problem classes they solve. Now it seems to stop at just teaching programs, because there is so much out there that is doing the same exact thing, but different branding, there's never enough time to dig into what is going on under the covers.

zzo38computer 5y ago
I use IRC; it is good. I also use NNTP is also good. There are other protocols can be good too. They can be good for different purposes. There is also I can store all of the files on my own computer. I don't need to store them elsewhere, except to make backups. I use DVDs for local private backups. For public files, I also store them on DVDs, but also on other internet services (such as chiselapp), too. There are many computer games that don't need internet connection. Some of them, but not all of them, are designed for older computer systems such as NES/Famicom, which can be emulated on many computers, so it doesn't matter what operating system you are on, it will likely work. Better documentation is helpful. Describe the program, the protocols, file formats, etc. This is how to learn working with computer. Other programs doing same kind of things can differ in many more ways other than only the branding though; some have different features, source code availability, etc.
Karunamon 5y ago
Need chat? IRC, at your service. Just.. no. Please stop pushing IRC. It's had decades to evolve and still today lacks really basic QoL things like a good mobile story (always-on connections won't fly, bouncers are limited hacks), permissions, or user registration that doesn't look like an 80s xterm. Matrix is carrying that torch now. IRC is an evolutionary dead-end that will only ever be used by techies.

andrepd 5y ago

> (spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again) Ahaha, I don't touch web apps unless I really really have to. And even then it's lighter stuff, like chats. Can you imagine using an actual productivity application in the browser?? No thanks. The thought that Slack/Ms Teams/Discord all run slower than MSN Messenger did in 2005 despite my having a computer ~50x more powerful is depressing enough (and each of them consuming as much RAM as I had on my desktop back in the day!).

oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
> Can you imagine using an actual productivity application in the browser? I'm not sure what type of applications you're referring to, but if you're including word processing in that, then I can't imagine not using either Google Docs, or whatever might one day come along and be a reasonable alternative. If I'm using a word processor, it's because I want someone else to be able to read and, quite often, contribute to what I'm creating. That is far, far less painful using Google Docs than Pages or whatever the alternative might be.
- andrepd 5y ago
  I mean things like: Photoshop, Blender, video editing software, MuseScore, Ableton, etc. And of course, text editors / IDEs :P > If I'm using a word processor, it's because I want someone else to be able to read and, quite often, contribute to what I'm creating. Well, the vast majority of things I write, I write by myself. When I have to collaborate I (begrudgingly :)) use Overleaf / Google Docs.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    Isn't VS Code the most popular IDE currently?
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      Most likely. It's not the best IDE but it is likely the best free one. Out of the box VS Code is pretty much good to go while others are either paid or take a lot of config. I have attempted to use vim but I just can't be bothered working out how to turn it in to VS code. If I have to decide between multiple ways to install plugins with their own tradeoffs, its already too much work when vs code just works.

beckman466 5y ago

> I don't know if there is any real way we can go back to the P2P paradigm Have you heard out The holochain framework?

zzo38computer 5y ago

Yes, I want to save the files locally to the disk. I don't use Figma, Slack, Notion, Facebook, Twitter (except sometimes for reading, using Nitter), or Google Docs. You could save the HTML, but that isn't always ideal. Having defined file formats can help, which is the case when using email, NNTP, ActivityPub, IRC, etc. FTP is no good. There are better protocols, such as HTTP, Gopher, Gemini, Plan9, etc. I had made up a file format for serving directory listings by HTTP (but I don't know how to configure Apache, or to write an extension for Apache, to be able to use it). About "who think the browser should be for browsing documents and not virtualizing apps", it is badly designed for virtualizing apps. (I have thought of some better ways.) Also, the file system paradigm does not fail with shared content; you could have the program to mount a remote file system and then access it using local programs, if wanted. (You can then also easily to copy files between your computer and remotely, in this way, by using the standard operating system commands for doing so, and will work just as well with command-line or GUI. Similarly, for SQL databases, you can have an extension to expose remote data as a virtual table, and you can then easily copy data between locally and remotely.)

yzmtf2008 5y ago
> you could have the program to mount a remote file system and then access it using local programs, if wanted Sounds good. Where is such program? This is surely not a very novel idea, but where is it? Hint: - remote file systems suck. see: sshfs - the feature set you think are important are maybe not important enough to that many people
- john-aj 5y ago
  sshfs sucks, sure, but there are other file system protocols. Plan 9's 9fs is pretty cool.
- systoll 5y ago
  Not that I disagree with your overall point, but there are multiple products in that space. It's clearly not a deal-breaker for most; but if anyone's lamenting the lack of a GoogleDocsFS, they can get one: https://mountainduck.io https://mountainduck.io https://cloudmounter.net https://cloudmounter.net https://www.expandrive.com/desktop/ https://www.expandrive.com/desktop/ https://github.com/pranavmk98/gDocsFS https://github.com/pranavmk98/gDocsFS

jen20 5y ago

I for one want nothing to do with this. File system access is for good actors only, and the advertising assholes have poisoned the well for a web browser being anything other than a dumb document browser with the privacy settings turned up to the max for me.

MikeUt 5y ago
> File system access How about just subfolder access? Limit facebook.com's permissions to only the user/facebook/ folder.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  How about just anonymous file descriptors. It asks for a file, the user gives it one or they don't. It can't make any use of any filenames whatsoever.
  - zzo38computer 5y ago
    That can be a better idea. (Unfortunately the HTML file input in any web browser that I have tried does not allow the user to change the file name to a different name than the local file name. This ought to be fixed.) When it asks the user for a file, can also specify the wanted access: read, write, read+seek, or read+write+seek. Requested format can also be specified, but the user should be allowed to ignore the requested format if wanted and instead specify an arbitrary file. For writes, estimated file size can also be specified as a hint, which can also be ignored. Then the user can type in a file name, or for the non-seeking modes, a pipe is also possible. For write non-seeking, the user can specify append or overwrite. For seekable files, a pipe is not valid. For writing to files, the user can also optionally specify the maximum size that the file is allowed to have.
- fragileone 5y ago
  That's basically what file system access is like in Android, unless you give an app Storage permission. Seems sandboxed enough if no other web apps can view it.

fukmbas 5y ago

The reality is we don't even need these systems you're talking about...

rexreed 5y ago

We are living in a multi-device, instant-access, access-anywhere, cloud-based world, and the desktop file-based paradigm has trouble with this reality. The vast majority of non-technical people would struggle with desktop-based files when they want everything everywhere all the time on every device at any moment.

lc9er 5y ago
Is that what they want, though? Most people that work an office job, at least, still deal with Excel, Word, and Outlook. Maybe they’ll setup work email on their phone, but that’s probably it. I’ve noticed a pushback (true for myself, too) ever since the push from work-supplied devices to BYOD.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  People are realizing mixing private and work communications on the same device is a bad idea. The kicker is, this isn't even some kind of corporate conspiracy. It's just human nature - if you hook up your business e-mail to your private phone, you are going to be checking it after work hours, you will start responding to e-mails, and your work habits will shift to account for that. That's why I just don't do that first step. The only connection between my current smartphone and my work is some TOTP keys in the authenticator app, to enable more convenient login to some cloud services the employer makes us use. I talked with a co-worker recently, who made the mistake of installing work communications on their personal smartphone, and they very much regret it - not because the company is exploiting it, but because they can't discipline themselves to not check business messages after work.

crossroadsguy 5y ago

It’s the same reason I utterly dislike Standard Notes. It has no local files (that’s a must for a note taking app).

hanche 5y ago
That depends what you mean by local files: On the Mac, at least, it will keep local backups. See the Backups menu item. Admittedly, the backups are not in a convenient format, rather being json files containing encrypted blobs. But there is a utility for decrypting all the files. So if you are merely worried about losing access, you're covered. So long as you don't lose your password, that is. But for sure, other solutions work better if you have less stringent security requirements.

kodablah 5y ago

> don't know if there is any real way we can go back to the P2P paradigm without destroying NAT I think it's time for NAT to go for residential ipv6 and the numbers I've seen show that TURN isn't required for most connections. Unfortunately universities and businesses will probably never remove NAT as there is limited incentive to do so. I think the best we can do is have somewhat decentralized networks with limited yet trusted centralized authorities (the need for discoverability will always remain, even when using otherwise decentralized networks like SSB). This could be IPFS with bootstrap nodes for their DHT, or as I have been using to circumvent NAT when latency is unimportant, Tor directory authority to host ephemeral, local onion services.

nobody_nothing 5y ago

> Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it? Just curious, does anyone know of any hybrid file formats that store information both locally and online? It seems like one solution to this problem would be a document that stores an editable copy locally and a revision hash in its metadata, then decides whether to serve up the local or cloud copy depending on whether the user is connected to the internet. Sure, this could cause conflicts between online / cloud files if someone else edits the file at the same time as you, but that's true of any cloud sync service like iOS Notes. I guess in retrospect I'm just describing Dropbox which, while it's more a container for standard files than a file format in itself, has largely the same effect.

thu2111 5y ago
Yes, filesystem sync protocols like rsync do it at the FS level and if you want to go deeper than the FS level, you get into the realm of operational transform and other rather complex algorithms. A very insightful comment up thread observes that filesystem-centric computing worked for as long as collaboration was very limited. Once apps needed to move beyond that to collaboration at a finer grained level it fell apart and apps started needing databases, and in particular, databases that could link data from different users together, implying a shared privacy domain. Was this change inevitable? The long since exiled and forgotten Hans Reiser wrote about this problem a lot back in the day (he murdered his wife and obviously his ideas lost any traction at that point). His thesis predated a lot of the concerns about privacy and central control that we see today, but briefly, he argued a part of why this was happening was that filesystem technology was not good enough because it couldn't handle very small files and because POSIX had some unnecessary limitations. Due to this lack, apps were constantly forced to invent filesystem-within-a-file formats, e.g. OLE2 and OpenDoc were both centred around this concept, SQLite obviously is one too, ZIP yes, but really most file formats can be viewed as a collection of small files within a file. The idea was, if you upgrade filesystem tech, you can radically change how apps are written. The problem is that operating system tech on servers and desktops has been stagnant for years. Microsoft and Apple lost interest in their primary operating systems and the open source world has never really been interested in going beyond 1970s design ideas, largely because cloning and adding small elaborations to commercial designs is the way the community stays unified. Look at the mass hysteria that followed systemd, which is one of the only upgrades to the core UNIX OS design patterns in decades. Actually making changes to the core of POSIX isn't something that's going to come out of that community. It'll probably take some company that wants to innovate on the core ideas again.

syrrim 5y ago

I have trouble believing that this is the fault of the techie lobby, considering that said lobby otherwise has no meaningful accomplishments under its belt. My explanation would be that the web is massively successful because it enables user to navigate safely without being in danger of leaking their files. If a user isn't willing to install an app to do a task, it is precisely because they fear that such an app will be able to do unknown damage to their computer. Allowing the same thing of web apps eliminates their advantage and endangers users.

skohan 5y ago

It's not only ads. Autodesk I believe does online rendering now, and for most CAD drawings even a cheap APU can handle that level of geometry, but it's harder to justify a recurring revenue model for a fully local application.

jacquesm 5y ago
> it's harder to justify a recurring revenue model for a fully local application. Then don't. Software was plenty profitable when we were just selling licenses.

slver 5y ago

You can put url shortcuts on your desktop. Also Figma is part of a terrible trend and I hate this crap as a web dev.

VladimirGolovin 5y ago
As someone who has been designing stuff in native file-based apps for 30 years, I consider Figma a godsend -- because of their collaboration / multiplayer features. And I don't miss files at all, though of course I understand that I do not control my data stored in Figma.
- slver 5y ago
  It points to the need for native software to allow collaboration and this is actually happening slowly. I still hate Figma though. It's too primitive and I'm sick of being given Figma links where the necessary resources are 50% chance not isolated, or not vector, or not exposed at all.

amyjess 5y ago

I'm not really sure how Slack saving documents to disk would really make sense. IRC was around before SaaS took off and webapps replaced desktop apps, but I can't think of a client that implemented "IRC documents" saved to disk. Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format, and you didn't open them with your IRC client. Hell, you couldn't open them with your IRC client. There's no reason you can't just ctrl-C a bunch of stuff out of a Slack chat and ctrl-V it into your text editor. Only difference between that and IRC logging is that you have to do it manually.

enriquto 5y ago
> they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format Of course they are! Using anything other than text files to store chat logs would be idiotic. The main point is that slack is a user-hostile application that does not even allow you to do that. Why people put up with this is beyond me.
nexuist 5y ago
> Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. Right, my point is why doesn't Slack do that? Then you could use `grep` or `find` to search across all your messages and avoid paying a monthly fee to access your entire message history and...oh, right.
- onion2k 5y ago
  You can only search a log for the time that you were logged in and saving it. You can search the entire history of many Slack channels from the very first message posted in it onwards, even before you'd ever joined it. That's a significant advantage over a local file. I'm not particularly keen on Slack but suggesting search would be better locally is plain silly. Search is obviously better done at the server.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago

titzer 5y ago

> (spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again) Oh god, please, no. I don't really understand the disconnect between your love of filesystems and yet disdain for native apps. The exact same arguments apply; can't serve ads locally, don't autoupdate (a feature! they rot slower), can access any time, don't need a network. Why would you want a webapp? Because it has flashier animations and SVG? There's a long conversation to be had about this, but the summary is no, no, god no, please give me back my native applications with drop-down menus and boring file picker dialogs. As long as they have decent keyboard shortcuts, I'll manage.

joeberon 5y ago
Who said they disdain native apps? They simply believe that web apps have/will continue to take over. You aren't going to get back native applications for every product just because you prefer it or that to you it is better. There are factors more powerful than that which are determining that web apps are more suitable. For example: ability to serve ads, autoupdate, AB testing, tracking Maybe those things are bad for you but are they bad for the people who make the product? No, they're pretty good things for the company, maybe even expected in 2021. Your preference against those things doesn't change that fact

Krasnol 5y ago

Those social media contents you've listed there is nothing anybody wants to keep. Let's be real here. This is throwaway information. While outside of the edgy cool startup bubble the rest of the professional information is still being saved somewhere. Sometimes even saved AND printed. No matter if it was on Slack, Teams or wherever.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> Those social media contents you've listed there is nothing anybody wants to keep. I do. It's a chunk of my life. These are memories. Much like a paper journal and paper letters I may have been writing instead.

bobbylarrybobby 5y ago

For the record, Apple’s office suite apps have no problem with multiple people collaborating on files that they have on disk

mch82 5y ago

Here’s an interesting example of an app that runs in browser and opens/saves SQLite GeoPackage files on the computer running the browser instead of a remote server. https://ngageoint.github.io/geopackage-js/ https://ngageoint.github.io/geopackage-js/

f1refly 5y ago

> this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again I don't see this. The native program ecosystem is alive and well as far as I'm concerned. All the programs on my computers are native, despite noone "going back". > Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it? It's much easier for Google to store the data on their server so that everyone can access it instead of you setting up some god-awful FTP-or-whatever solution so that your wife can pull up the grocery list at the store. Now go and check out syncthing, you're in for a really good time.

magpi3 5y ago

I keep repeating this argument in different forums, but: if you every lived in China you would realize that the native app is the past and the future. Since governments can block websites, that means they can block your web apps too. When I came to China I completely lost access to Google Docs, Gmail, Facebook, etc. Relying on web apps is exactly like giving governments the right to uninstall applications on your computer. Right now this is not a big deal in most countries. Right now. But as the web becomes increasingly balkanized (and I believe it will) and as countries become less democratic (always a possibility) the native app with local data will reassert its prominence in people's lives.

ggk 5y ago
> Relying on web apps is exactly like giving governments the right to uninstall applications on your computer. To some extent, governments, across the globe, are already exercising this right in some form. Quite often we hear that some government has banned some app and it becomes illegal to use that app in that country.
SiVal 5y ago
This is an important point, but then "native" iOS has the same vulnerability. Apple arguably has more power to block iOS apps than China has to block the Web, so China just tells Apple to block what they want blocked, and Apple does it.
- cosmojg 5y ago
  If it makes you feel better, efforts are being made to bring non-tyrannical operating systems to mobile in a braindead-easy, consumer-friendly fashion. You can search up loads of articles about the amazing stuff that the peeps running organizations like Pine64 and LineageOS have been up to. I'm carefully optimistic!

frobisher 5y ago

Some other reasons for saving files in the cloud not mentioned: - lets you access them cross-device more easily (replicating the files on each device could be could, but uploading to the cloud seems easier); - backup, in case my device breaks or is lost

pjmlp 5y ago

> this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again Mobile phones, tablets and IoT native apps say Hello.

CPLNTN 5y ago

Considering how messy the author is, all those files you mentioned would just end up in his download folder.

CRConrad 5y ago
Yeah, well, it's not 100 % his fault. Browsers should default to "Ask every time" for download file location, in stead of just bunging everything into a default "Downloads" folder. But that's really fucking easy to change, so still 90 % his fault. (Or 95, 99...?)

MaxBarraclough 5y ago

> we stopped using files to represent information. Figma, Slack, and Notion should save their information to disk. You should be able to open a Notion document, or a Figma design, from your desktop A good observation, but I think it conflates two different trends: 1. Some software platforms deliberately limit what data is stored on your local machine under your control 2. There's been a shift in UI/UX away from using files as a first-class abstraction There's a good case to be made that a UI should generally hide the specifics of its data storage. As an example, it's a good thing that most email clients present the user with their emails, rather than with a raw folder of files. (Internally, the email client might make use of a database rather than a directory, so it might make good back-end sense too.) Of course, that's not the same thing as the email client being hostile to data-portability. iOS strongly commits to this ideal, even at the expense of constraining user actions. The podcast app doesn't let you upload your downloaded podcast episodes to your desktop computer, for instance. Aside: iOS has very poor support for dealing with files in the usual ways, to the point that you pretty much need to use a third-party app to do so. I've found the freeware Documents app by Readdle to be very good for this. > this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again I agree that the web as a GUI toolkit is here to stay, but native apps are alive and well too. There's a trend to try to push users off the mobile web and onto native apps (Facebook, Gmail, reddit), rather than the other way round.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

> this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again This snippet has really lit the touchpaper. A long time ago, I predicted that the world was course to deliver insta-compiled applications through a browser, as though we'd have a Visual Basic runtime environment plugin. However, we're now there, essentially, with XHR and many-megabyte JS bundles, manipulating the DOM through the browser's "widget" engine. There's really a tipping point for each application, where the application's functionality determines where it is better served. For instance, no one's going to make a web app out of Logic Pro any time soon. However, if someone comes up with a stateful protocol to implement in current browsers, then that tipping point flips to the web for a whole bunch of applications.

passivate 5y ago

I work in biotech and our business would cease to exist without access to native apps. So would many other businesses in many other industries.

baxuz 5y ago

Not just that. We have a lot more metadata these days and not everything can be a file. If you keep all the metadata and database-like files accessible to the user, how do you handle store corruption? EG, a video recording/playback app that allows the user to save bookmarks/timestamps. You'd need to have some place to store those bookmarks, extract frames, generate multiple resolutions for both the video and frames (for gallery previews etc), possibly add some more metadata... It's much easier to hide the actual files from the user and give them the option to export the data in some user-readable format. Apple is notorious for this. Everything is a soup of folders and files with hashes and .plist files. Similar story with iOS and Android.