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The ratio of hot air to righteous anger in this rant is too high. Concrete points Dziuba makes: a) Chrome is only out for Windows b) Web applications can be m

The ratio of hot air to righteous anger in this rant is too high. Concrete points Dziuba makes: a) Chrome is only out for Windows b) Web applications can be more resource intensive than desktop apps Is there anyone reading Hacker News who wasn't aware of these points? With WebKit/V8/etc, Chrome essentially acts as the language runtime, so the software stack he draws doesn't even get any taller (once the browser releases for all OSes).

iamdave 18y ago
Well he also makes the good point that the web is pointlessly obfuscating everyday operations while balkanizing the end-user market at the same time. Average users don't care if they can publish their resume online, they just want to do it. If they use a web app, they use a web app. In the end, they just want to get things done. I think it's a solid article.
wheels 18y ago
The other important point, hit right up there at the front is: desktop apps aren't going away anytime soon. It's been a real ride for me coming back into the web world after about 6 years of working on enterprise and desktop apps. Everyone in the web world seems to think we're just on the cusp of everything moving over to the web. Which is pretty much what they were saying when I was working in web programming 7 years ago. To the rest of the universe, desktop apps are still mainstays of day-to-day computing and while there is a shift, it's much more gradual than people in the web business seem to assume. Amusingly, this phenomenon is not all that different from what folks working in the Linux desktop have been assuming since I got into that some 8 years ago: that this is the year of the Linux desktop. It's about to tip any day now...
- jacobscott 18y ago
  Okay, I agree. That makes three facts everyone knows to go with the three mspaint drawings. I appreciate ted's snark, I just wanted something compelling enough to get riled up in agreement.
  - wheels 18y ago
    Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere? This seems obvious to me, but I've gotten into a number of arguments with folks on it. There seems to be a certain fervor and excitement about "web 2.0" that people seem to get carried away in forecasting its implications. For me this is kind of amusing, since I've been tracking networking stuff through a couple decades of "thin client" fads. "The network is the computer" is hardly a new idea. :-) Usually when I want to be really productive on my computer, the first thing I do is unplug the DSL router. :-)
    - nostrademons 18y ago
      > Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere? When I worked at a company doing enterprise financial software, I got the distinct impression that it was virtually impossible to sell a new desktop app. Our customers wanted everything to be web-based. I was hired as a desktop app developer and got switched over to web development after 8 months because all our new products were web-based. I suspect that we'll see something similar to what happened with PCs and mainframes. The PC didn't kill the mainframe - all the old apps that used to run on mainframes still ran on mainframes. However, all new software, the category-killers that created new markets, were all developed on the PC. Mainframes stuck around for years before finally being killed by Y2K and web-based intranet apps, and some are still working. Similarly, I think any attempt to displace office suites and such on the web is a losing battle. PC-based apps are "good enough" for what they're used for. But virtually all new killer apps, the ones with exciting market opportunities, will be on the web. Or they'll be web/desktop hybrids like DropBox, RescueTime, or BitTorrent, in cases where the app needs some local data that the browser can't provide. Then PC apps will finally be killed by whatever new thick client ends up replacing the web, but we've got a while (maybe 10-20 years) before that happens.
      - lallysingh 18y ago
        Agreed. Also, it's finally a way to get customers onto subscription models, which has seemed the holy grail of desktop apps for some time. Write once, bill forever...
- goodness 18y ago
  In the case of the linux desktop, I have to say that I think it is a lot closer than 8 years ago. I have tried installing Linux at many points over the last 8 years or so. I have always abandoned it because configuring hardware took too much work. I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 on 3 different machines, including a brand new Dell laptop, and the install worked flawlessly on each. Most importantly, every piece of hardware I've tried worked with basically no configuration - sound card, internal microphone, wireless, and graphics card. I did install a new driver for the Nvidia graphics card, but this was mostly optional. Also, when I've needed to tweak settings or install the new driver for the video card, I've done it through a GUI rather than the command line and various cryptic config files. Installing software through Synaptic is also awesome. This is one place where Linux now actually excels over Windows. Of course, I haven't actually needed to install anything that's not in synaptic yet.
  - eru 18y ago
    You can usually just add repositories to get almost anything into Synaptic. Compiling on your own does not need more than calling configure and make in most cases, though.
jules 18y ago
The stack doesn't get taller, but it does get much slower. Javascript just isn't a good VM "bytecode". And HTML isn't a good graphics API.
- philf 18y ago
  V8 actually compiles JS to native code.
  - jules 18y ago
    And it's still orders of magnitude slower than native applications.
    - qwph 18y ago
      Can you publish the results that this assertion is based on please?
      - orib 18y ago
        Google is failing me now and I've got class in the morning, but you can find benchmarks comparing Lua-JIT and V8, and Lua-JIT beats V8. Lua-JIT is quite a bit slower than native code. Depending on what you're doing/benchmarking it seems to generally be between 5 to 10 times slower.
      - jules 18y ago
        http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/ http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/ Chrome isn't much faster than the others.

iamdave 18y ago

Well he also makes the good point that the web is pointlessly obfuscating everyday operations while balkanizing the end-user market at the same time. Average users don't care if they can publish their resume online, they just want to do it. If they use a web app, they use a web app. In the end, they just want to get things done. I think it's a solid article.

wheels 18y ago

The other important point, hit right up there at the front is: desktop apps aren't going away anytime soon. It's been a real ride for me coming back into the web world after about 6 years of working on enterprise and desktop apps. Everyone in the web world seems to think we're just on the cusp of everything moving over to the web. Which is pretty much what they were saying when I was working in web programming 7 years ago. To the rest of the universe, desktop apps are still mainstays of day-to-day computing and while there is a shift, it's much more gradual than people in the web business seem to assume. Amusingly, this phenomenon is not all that different from what folks working in the Linux desktop have been assuming since I got into that some 8 years ago: that this is the year of the Linux desktop. It's about to tip any day now...

jacobscott 18y ago
Okay, I agree. That makes three facts everyone knows to go with the three mspaint drawings. I appreciate ted's snark, I just wanted something compelling enough to get riled up in agreement.
- wheels 18y ago
  Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere? This seems obvious to me, but I've gotten into a number of arguments with folks on it. There seems to be a certain fervor and excitement about "web 2.0" that people seem to get carried away in forecasting its implications. For me this is kind of amusing, since I've been tracking networking stuff through a couple decades of "thin client" fads. "The network is the computer" is hardly a new idea. :-) Usually when I want to be really productive on my computer, the first thing I do is unplug the DSL router. :-)
  - nostrademons 18y ago
    > Do you get the sense that everyone in the web world knows that desktop apps aren't going anywhere? When I worked at a company doing enterprise financial software, I got the distinct impression that it was virtually impossible to sell a new desktop app. Our customers wanted everything to be web-based. I was hired as a desktop app developer and got switched over to web development after 8 months because all our new products were web-based. I suspect that we'll see something similar to what happened with PCs and mainframes. The PC didn't kill the mainframe - all the old apps that used to run on mainframes still ran on mainframes. However, all new software, the category-killers that created new markets, were all developed on the PC. Mainframes stuck around for years before finally being killed by Y2K and web-based intranet apps, and some are still working. Similarly, I think any attempt to displace office suites and such on the web is a losing battle. PC-based apps are "good enough" for what they're used for. But virtually all new killer apps, the ones with exciting market opportunities, will be on the web. Or they'll be web/desktop hybrids like DropBox, RescueTime, or BitTorrent, in cases where the app needs some local data that the browser can't provide. Then PC apps will finally be killed by whatever new thick client ends up replacing the web, but we've got a while (maybe 10-20 years) before that happens.
    - lallysingh 18y ago
      Agreed. Also, it's finally a way to get customers onto subscription models, which has seemed the holy grail of desktop apps for some time. Write once, bill forever...
goodness 18y ago
In the case of the linux desktop, I have to say that I think it is a lot closer than 8 years ago. I have tried installing Linux at many points over the last 8 years or so. I have always abandoned it because configuring hardware took too much work. I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 on 3 different machines, including a brand new Dell laptop, and the install worked flawlessly on each. Most importantly, every piece of hardware I've tried worked with basically no configuration - sound card, internal microphone, wireless, and graphics card. I did install a new driver for the Nvidia graphics card, but this was mostly optional. Also, when I've needed to tweak settings or install the new driver for the video card, I've done it through a GUI rather than the command line and various cryptic config files. Installing software through Synaptic is also awesome. This is one place where Linux now actually excels over Windows. Of course, I haven't actually needed to install anything that's not in synaptic yet.
- eru 18y ago
  You can usually just add repositories to get almost anything into Synaptic. Compiling on your own does not need more than calling configure and make in most cases, though.

jules 18y ago

The stack doesn't get taller, but it does get much slower. Javascript just isn't a good VM "bytecode". And HTML isn't a good graphics API.

philf 18y ago
V8 actually compiles JS to native code.
- jules 18y ago
  And it's still orders of magnitude slower than native applications.
  - qwph 18y ago
    Can you publish the results that this assertion is based on please?
    - orib 18y ago
      Google is failing me now and I've got class in the morning, but you can find benchmarks comparing Lua-JIT and V8, and Lua-JIT beats V8. Lua-JIT is quite a bit slower than native code. Depending on what you're doing/benchmarking it seems to generally be between 5 to 10 times slower.
    - jules 18y ago
      http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/ http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/ Chrome isn't much faster than the others.