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As a member of the Swing/JavaFX/Netbeans teams during the 2005-2010 period (I left the day before Oracle took over), I can tell you that this story is broadly c

As a member of the Swing/JavaFX/Netbeans teams during the 2005-2010 period (I left the day before Oracle took over), I can tell you that this story is broadly correct, but with many missing subtleties. At the time we thought of Silverlight and Flash and Adobe Air as our mortal enemies. We were all wrong. After AJAX and HTML Canvas the web essentially killed desktop app development. All of those internal corporate apps (which were 95% of the desktop Java apps written) migrated to the web. We certainly all made mistakes and could have done some things differently (I begged to write the Applet plugin from scratch), but in the end none of those changes would have mattered. The future of desktop was the web.

jcelerier 5y ago
Yet it's 2022 and I literally don't use web-based desktop apps for my day-to-day work ? Likewise, the SteamDeck just released with a desktop UI built entirely in Qt? I feel we are living in alternate realities
- poisonborz 5y ago
  How does your statement contradict anything? What you use is entirely anecdotical, and the Deck is a niche gaming platform. Except for niche usages like utilities and the creative industry, classical desktop apps are dead for both consumer and enterprise users.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    > Except for niche usages like utilities and the creative industry, classical desktop apps are dead for both consumer and enterprise users. I don't even understand what you mean by "niche usages like utilities". Utilities aren't "niche". And I literally don't know anyone who uses a computer and does not use some form of "creative" / authoring apps. Some drawing apps, some music production or maybe just the occasional recording with Audacity, trying to make games, editing ebooks with Calibre, etc. That's what human beings use computers for (and we're here to do things for human beings before anything).
- nouveaux 5y ago
  Its likely that you and HN are different from the majority. Web is the de-facto targets for the vast majority of development. The vast majority of users use apps on the web with a few exception. I'm pretty sure most people I know use mail in the browser. Even a lot of the Office Suite is being used in the web. I'm sure there are a small group of people who use native apps for everything but the rest of the population is using the browser most of the time.

jcelerier 5y ago

Yet it's 2022 and I literally don't use web-based desktop apps for my day-to-day work ? Likewise, the SteamDeck just released with a desktop UI built entirely in Qt? I feel we are living in alternate realities

poisonborz 5y ago
How does your statement contradict anything? What you use is entirely anecdotical, and the Deck is a niche gaming platform. Except for niche usages like utilities and the creative industry, classical desktop apps are dead for both consumer and enterprise users.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > Except for niche usages like utilities and the creative industry, classical desktop apps are dead for both consumer and enterprise users. I don't even understand what you mean by "niche usages like utilities". Utilities aren't "niche". And I literally don't know anyone who uses a computer and does not use some form of "creative" / authoring apps. Some drawing apps, some music production or maybe just the occasional recording with Audacity, trying to make games, editing ebooks with Calibre, etc. That's what human beings use computers for (and we're here to do things for human beings before anything).
nouveaux 5y ago
Its likely that you and HN are different from the majority. Web is the de-facto targets for the vast majority of development. The vast majority of users use apps on the web with a few exception. I'm pretty sure most people I know use mail in the browser. Even a lot of the Office Suite is being used in the web. I'm sure there are a small group of people who use native apps for everything but the rest of the population is using the browser most of the time.