6 ms·

> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps. The time for PWAs was in about 1998, when WAP was a th

> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps. The time for PWAs was in about 1998, when WAP was a thing. Much as I would love a universal bytecode that would allow mobile phones to achieve this, PWAs are not the route to get there. They are a mess of custom, poorly documented and ever changing layers of web bits. Yes, web assembly exists, yes its about 75% the speed of native. and its not as easy to develop for. I also don't see why phone makers will want to make it that easy. Unless they are forced to provide parity for their APIS, it'll always be second best to native. But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery" you can spot the react native apps when you use them(yes, yes I know its not entirely the same) We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002. You don't have that luxury on mobile. You are limited by battery capacity, unless we suddenly find a way to 100x battery density, it'll be like that for a while. That being said, the work on breaking the app store dominance is welcome. 25% tax on development is taking the piss. Obviously the "point" of the walled garden was to provide security to the end user, however google fucked that right up, so now its obviously just a cash cow. But, I want a way to side load apps, I want a second market place. I don't want fucking PWAs on my phone.

fwsgonzo 3y ago
75% is a stretch. The last time I tested it, it was ~50% of my native program despite my best efforts, with AOT. Which is still good btw, just not as constantly advertised.
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  My colleague has been doing some stonking work with it, he claims its about 70% as fast, I was rounding up for safety!
  - fwsgonzo 3y ago
    That's pretty good if you ask me! I was using an image encoder that had a WebAssembly SIMD CMake option, which is nice, but it only had half of native performance. I suppose it will continue to improve over time.
    - amadeuspagel 3y ago
      This is not a typical app.
      - kevingadd 3y ago
        Encoding images is a pretty typical thing to do though?
    - fyrn_ 3y ago
      Depending on the browser and also when this was WASM SIMD could have been a pessimization. It added first with compatibility in mind and took/is taking awhile to reach full performance potential
PaulHoule 3y ago
Or what about plain ordinary web sites? I’d say that most of the time a brand has no business making an app when they just want to get a message out to people. For instance McDonald’s has an app to order food but why don’t they just make a web site you can order food from? Can it really be easier for end users to use an app that requires an extra installation step? I mean AMZN and Ebay had sites you could order all kinds of things in 1999 and they didn’t even need React.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Web Apps don't require an extra installation step, they merely allow the user to "install" the app -- to pin it to the homescreen and have it open without the browser UI.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I’ve never understood that. To me mobile icons all look the same and it is highly stressful to scroll through pages of them. Even Apple is terrible if you just stop and think. Photos are just a meaningless pinwheel, the Settings are hidden behind a movie poster for The Golden Compass, if I had a Hacker News app it would get confused with all the other apps that have an H or N or Y for their icon or that are colored orange. As it is I can type “n” on my iPad and… it is auto suggested. I type “1” and it suggests my web based RSS reader - why are brands shooting themselves in the foot by getting lost in a maze of twisty icons that all look alike? What I don’t understand is that I can frequently ‘grok’ icons on my desktop although I hardly ever use them (so much easier to hit the windows button and type 2 or 3 letters and hit enter). Steam will install icons for games I download an instantly I know that’s Atelier Sophie. I use Microsoft’s RDP client for iPad all the time and think it is great but the icon is completely meaningless, it is just some burnt umber wedges that look like the logo of a multimodal shipping company from the 1970s.
    - antihipocrat 3y ago
      Scrolling through the app list stresses me out too, I avoid it and just pin apps I regularly use to the home screens. Authenticator apps are a great example, I don't use them often enough to pin to home and all are identically named and have generic icons. Another pain point is the overuse of material design with similar color schemes (it's not just google apps that use this). Half the app list become lost in a sea of red, blue, green and yellow fragments.
times_trw 3y ago
>We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002. I war running mIRC in 2002. Slack is worse.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  Even today, mIRC is still faster than Slack. Yes! It's still a functioning application on Windows! I use it from time to time.
  - tommek4077 3y ago
    You missed the point. Of course it is still faster. Its like a hundred times smaller doing the same stuff.
    - deafpolygon 3y ago
      I don't think I missed the point at all.
- weinzierl 3y ago
  When I got Internet I was basically in mIRC and Mosaic and it wasn't clear to me at all that the web will be the big thing and IRC a niche one day. Similarly its a bit funny that mIRC survives to this day but the browser of the day died long ago.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Obligatory comic: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg
- epolanski 3y ago
  Eh, I think those posts really fail to highlight the amount of features more slack has and this comes from am a long-lived IRC user that started on quakenet 25 years ago and still uses IRC today (through IRCCloud), mostly for libera (former freenode). A very tiny and incomplete list: - well working secure file transfer - always on chat history that doesn't rely on you being online or running/buying an irc-bot - voice and video calls - threads - avatars - added layers of security and authentication (critical for business) - plugins/addons (everything on IRC had to be implemented with a chatbot and it was quite limited) - text formatting - support for longer text messages It's really an apple to oranges comparison to be honest. Yes, they are both fruits, as in they are both used to communicate, but this is where the comparison ends.
supermatt 3y ago
> you can spot the react native apps when you use them Bullshit. React native uses native components, that is why its called react native. You are likely confusing react native with those other tech stacks that use a webview, like phonegap/cordova, etc, in which you can use react DOM (not native).
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  Bullshit to your bullshit. React native is mostly interpreted Javascript-based additional layer on top of a platform native components.
  - supermatt 3y ago
    And you can spot that when you use them? How, exactly? I can understand the phonegap/cordova confusion, as they will only ever be styled imitations of the real components so may not look or behave exactly the same - but react native is using native components, so what difference is there to "spot"?
niutech 3y ago
> But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery" It's not PWA's fault as a set of Web APIs. This is due to abusing these Web APIs by lazy/ignorant web devs, who create monsters like Slack instead of e.g. Let's Chat (https://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow-here-are-5-lightweight.html https://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow...). As for example Slack, I'm using Wee-Slack + Glowing Bear (https://glowing-bear.org https://glowing-bear.org) and it's very snappy. I don't need a closed-source binary blob on my tablet.

fwsgonzo 3y ago

75% is a stretch. The last time I tested it, it was ~50% of my native program despite my best efforts, with AOT. Which is still good btw, just not as constantly advertised.

KaiserPro 3y ago
My colleague has been doing some stonking work with it, he claims its about 70% as fast, I was rounding up for safety!
- fwsgonzo 3y ago
  That's pretty good if you ask me! I was using an image encoder that had a WebAssembly SIMD CMake option, which is nice, but it only had half of native performance. I suppose it will continue to improve over time.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    This is not a typical app.
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      Encoding images is a pretty typical thing to do though?
  - fyrn_ 3y ago
    Depending on the browser and also when this was WASM SIMD could have been a pessimization. It added first with compatibility in mind and took/is taking awhile to reach full performance potential

PaulHoule 3y ago

Or what about plain ordinary web sites? I’d say that most of the time a brand has no business making an app when they just want to get a message out to people. For instance McDonald’s has an app to order food but why don’t they just make a web site you can order food from? Can it really be easier for end users to use an app that requires an extra installation step? I mean AMZN and Ebay had sites you could order all kinds of things in 1999 and they didn’t even need React.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
Web Apps don't require an extra installation step, they merely allow the user to "install" the app -- to pin it to the homescreen and have it open without the browser UI.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I’ve never understood that. To me mobile icons all look the same and it is highly stressful to scroll through pages of them. Even Apple is terrible if you just stop and think. Photos are just a meaningless pinwheel, the Settings are hidden behind a movie poster for The Golden Compass, if I had a Hacker News app it would get confused with all the other apps that have an H or N or Y for their icon or that are colored orange. As it is I can type “n” on my iPad and… it is auto suggested. I type “1” and it suggests my web based RSS reader - why are brands shooting themselves in the foot by getting lost in a maze of twisty icons that all look alike? What I don’t understand is that I can frequently ‘grok’ icons on my desktop although I hardly ever use them (so much easier to hit the windows button and type 2 or 3 letters and hit enter). Steam will install icons for games I download an instantly I know that’s Atelier Sophie. I use Microsoft’s RDP client for iPad all the time and think it is great but the icon is completely meaningless, it is just some burnt umber wedges that look like the logo of a multimodal shipping company from the 1970s.
  - antihipocrat 3y ago
    Scrolling through the app list stresses me out too, I avoid it and just pin apps I regularly use to the home screens. Authenticator apps are a great example, I don't use them often enough to pin to home and all are identically named and have generic icons. Another pain point is the overuse of material design with similar color schemes (it's not just google apps that use this). Half the app list become lost in a sea of red, blue, green and yellow fragments.

times_trw 3y ago

>We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002. I war running mIRC in 2002. Slack is worse.

deafpolygon 3y ago
Even today, mIRC is still faster than Slack. Yes! It's still a functioning application on Windows! I use it from time to time.
- tommek4077 3y ago
  You missed the point. Of course it is still faster. Its like a hundred times smaller doing the same stuff.
  - deafpolygon 3y ago
    I don't think I missed the point at all.
weinzierl 3y ago
When I got Internet I was basically in mIRC and Mosaic and it wasn't clear to me at all that the web will be the big thing and IRC a niche one day. Similarly its a bit funny that mIRC survives to this day but the browser of the day died long ago.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Obligatory comic: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg
epolanski 3y ago
Eh, I think those posts really fail to highlight the amount of features more slack has and this comes from am a long-lived IRC user that started on quakenet 25 years ago and still uses IRC today (through IRCCloud), mostly for libera (former freenode). A very tiny and incomplete list: - well working secure file transfer - always on chat history that doesn't rely on you being online or running/buying an irc-bot - voice and video calls - threads - avatars - added layers of security and authentication (critical for business) - plugins/addons (everything on IRC had to be implemented with a chatbot and it was quite limited) - text formatting - support for longer text messages It's really an apple to oranges comparison to be honest. Yes, they are both fruits, as in they are both used to communicate, but this is where the comparison ends.

supermatt 3y ago

> you can spot the react native apps when you use them Bullshit. React native uses native components, that is why its called react native. You are likely confusing react native with those other tech stacks that use a webview, like phonegap/cordova, etc, in which you can use react DOM (not native).

pi-e-sigma 3y ago
Bullshit to your bullshit. React native is mostly interpreted Javascript-based additional layer on top of a platform native components.
- supermatt 3y ago
  And you can spot that when you use them? How, exactly? I can understand the phonegap/cordova confusion, as they will only ever be styled imitations of the real components so may not look or behave exactly the same - but react native is using native components, so what difference is there to "spot"?

niutech 3y ago

> But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery" It's not PWA's fault as a set of Web APIs. This is due to abusing these Web APIs by lazy/ignorant web devs, who create monsters like Slack instead of e.g. Let's Chat (https://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow-here-are-5-lightweight.html https://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow...). As for example Slack, I'm using Wee-Slack + Glowing Bear (https://glowing-bear.org https://glowing-bear.org) and it's very snappy. I don't need a closed-source binary blob on my tablet.