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> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? Not going to happen until gui framewor

> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose? Not going to happen until gui frameworks are as comfortable and easy to set up and use as html. Entry barrier and ergonomics are among the biggest deciding factors of winning technologies.

dsego 8mo ago
There are cross platform concerns as well. If the option is to build 3-4 separate apps in different languages and with different UI toolkits to support all the major devices and operating systems, or use the web and be 80% there in terms of basic functionality, and also have better branding, I think the choice is not surprising.
- qsera 8mo ago
  I am not sure, it seems that cross platform Applciations are possible using something like python3/gtk/qt etc.
  - okanat 8mo ago
    Cross platform GUI libraries suck. Ever used a GTK app under Windows? It looks terrible, renders terrible, doesn't support HiDPI. Qt Widgets still have weird bugs when you connect or disconnect displays it rerenders UIs twice the size. None of those kinds of bugs exist for apps written in Microsoft's UI frameworks and browsers. The problem with cross platform UI is that it is antithetical to the purpose of an OS-native UI in its reason of existence. Cross platform tries to unify the UX while native UI tries to differentiate the UX. Native UI wants unique incompatible behavior. So the cross platform UI frameworks that try to use the actual OS components always end up with terrible visual bugs due to unifying things that don't want to be unified. Or worse many "cross platform" UI frameworks try to mimic the its developer's favorite OS. I have seen way too many Android apps that has "cross platform" frameworks that draw iOS UI elements. The best way to do cross platform applications with a GUI (I specifically avoid cross platform UI) is defining a yet another platform above a very basic common layer. This is what Web had done. What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web and this is why Electron works so well for applications deployed in multiple OSes.
    - qsera 8mo ago
      > Ever used a GTK app under Windows? I have created and used them. They didn't look terrible on windows. >What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web.. I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too.. I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good...
      - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
        There's loads of funding. But the ones funding Qt and GTK aren't parties interested in things like cohesion or design standards. They just needed a way to deliver their product to the user in a faster way than maintaining 2-3 OS platform apps. Wanting that shipping velocity by its nature sacrifices the above elements. The remnants of the dotcom era for web definitely helped shape it in a more design contentious way, in comparison. Those standards are created and pushed a few layers above that in which cross platform UI's work in.
      - okanat 8mo ago
        Here is Bleachbit, a GTK3-based disk cleanup utility. It is a blurry mess and GTK3 Window headers are completely out of style and behavior with Windows. https://imgur.com/a/ruTGUaF#ntnfeCJ https://imgur.com/a/ruTGUaF#ntnfeCJ https://imgur.com/yGhgkz2 https://imgur.com/yGhgkz2 -> Comparison with another open source app Notepad3 under Windows. > I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too.. The problem is they half-ass it. Qt only does it with QML. Qt Widgets is half-half and it is a mess. Overall these do not invalidate my point though. If you want a truly cross-platform application GUI, you need to rewrite the GUI for each OS. Or you give up and write one GUI that's running on its own platform. > I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good... Indeed, Google employs some of the smartest software developers and ones with really niche skills like Behdad Esfahbod who created the best or the second best font rendering library out there. However, Qt has a company behind (a very very incompetent one, not just the library but operating a business). I have seen many commercial libraries too, they are all various shades of terrible.
- mrweasel 8mo ago
  In line with "the web was a mistake" I think the idea that you can create cross platform software is an equally big mistake. You can do the core functionality of your product as cross platform, to some extend, but once you hit the interaction with the OS and especially the UI libraries of the OS, I think you'd get better software if you just accept that you'll need to write multiple application. We see this on mobile, there's just two target platform really, yet companies don't even want to do that. The choice isn't surprising, in a world where companies are more concerned with saving and branding, compared to creating good products.
  - asdff 8mo ago
    I've only done one platform gui work (python) but I'd guess this is stuff that is ripe for transpiling since a lot of gui code is just reusing the same boilerplate everyone is using to get the same ui patters everyone is using. Like if I make something in tkinter seems like it should be pretty straightforward to write a tool that can translate all my function calls as I've structured them into a chunk of Swift that would draw the same size window same buttons etc.
    - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
      We get into transpiling and we essentially start to rebuild yet another cross platform framework. Starts with "read this filetype and turn it into this layout" and it ends up with "we'll make sure this can deploy on X,Y,Z,W..." It'd be nice if companies could just play nice and agree on a standard interface. That's the one good thing the web managed to do. It's just stuck to what's ultimately 3 decades of tech debt from a prototype document reader made in a few weeks.
      - asdff 8mo ago
        >It'd be nice if companies could just play nice and agree on a standard interface They basically do though. Every cross platform native ported app I've used the GUI is the same layout. Well, except on macos the menu ribbon is on the topbar and windows it has its own ribbon layer in the application window. But that is it. All these frameworks already have feature parity with another. It is expected that they have these same functions and ui paradigms. Here's your button function. Here is where you specify window dimensions. This function opens a file browser. This one takes in user input to the textbox. I mean it is all pretty standardized and limited what you can expect to do in ui already.
- asdff 8mo ago
  There is a lot of stuff you can get done with the standard library alone of various languages that play nice on all major platforms. People tend to reach for whatever stack of dependencies is popular at the time, however.
arexxbifs 8mo ago
Visual Basic solved that. The web is in many ways a regression.
- dvdkon 8mo ago
  Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps, but those GUIs were rather static and limited by today's standards. People have now gotten used to responsive GUIs that resize to any window size, easy dynamic hiding of controls, and dynamic lists in any part of the GUI; you won't get them to come back to a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`.
  - arexxbifs 8mo ago
    > Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps Yes, they were comfortable and easy to set up (and use), particularly when compared to web development. > a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False` This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time, _especially_ when it started replacing RAD tools like VB and Delphi. In fact, it still looks like this in many ways, except now you have a JSX property and React state for disabling the button, and a mess of complex tooling, setup and node modules just to get to that base level. The web won not because of programmer convenience, but because it offered ease of distribution. Turns out everything else was secondary.
    - dvdkon 8mo ago
      > This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time React is over a decade old, and as far as I remember, desktop apps using embedded browsers (Electron) started becoming dominant after it came out. The ease-of-distribution advantage is huge, but web technologies are big outside the Web too, where it doesn't apply. (Besides my main point, idiomatic web UIs don't implement resize handlers for positioning each element manually, but instead use CSS to declaratively create layouts. Modern GUI libraries with visual builders can also do this, but it was decidedly not the norm in the 90s. Also, modern dynamic GUIs generally don't use a static layout with disabled parts, but hide or add parts outright. That kind of dynamicity is hard to even conceptualise with a GUI builder.)
asdff 8mo ago
Are they not? Gui libraries are like button(function=myFunction). This isn't rocket surgery stuff here at least the gui tooling I've used.
- m-schuetz 8mo ago
  Pretty much any non-web GUI framework I tried so far has either been terrible to set up, or terrible to deploy. Or both. Electron is stupidly simple. ImGUI is the single exception that has been simple to set up, trivial to deploy (there is nothing to deploy, including it is all that's needed), and nice to use.
  - asdff 8mo ago
    Tkinter is easy too.
  - _aavaa_ 8mo ago
    Except ImGUI’s missing what I consider essential features for macOS: proper multitouch support (two finger panning, pinch to zoom).
    - ocornut 8mo ago
      Specifically for panning and zooming, doesn't the OS translate those inputs to mouse events, like Windows does by default? Otherwise it is simply a matter of performing this translation at the backend level.
lpcvoid 8mo ago
Man, you never used Delphi or Lazarus then. That was comfortable and easy. Web by comparison is just a jarring mess of unfounded complexity.
0dayz 8mo ago
I feel that flutter is the first right step for this, it felt like a breath of fresh air to work with compared to the webstack.

dsego 8mo ago

There are cross platform concerns as well. If the option is to build 3-4 separate apps in different languages and with different UI toolkits to support all the major devices and operating systems, or use the web and be 80% there in terms of basic functionality, and also have better branding, I think the choice is not surprising.

qsera 8mo ago
I am not sure, it seems that cross platform Applciations are possible using something like python3/gtk/qt etc.
- okanat 8mo ago
  Cross platform GUI libraries suck. Ever used a GTK app under Windows? It looks terrible, renders terrible, doesn't support HiDPI. Qt Widgets still have weird bugs when you connect or disconnect displays it rerenders UIs twice the size. None of those kinds of bugs exist for apps written in Microsoft's UI frameworks and browsers. The problem with cross platform UI is that it is antithetical to the purpose of an OS-native UI in its reason of existence. Cross platform tries to unify the UX while native UI tries to differentiate the UX. Native UI wants unique incompatible behavior. So the cross platform UI frameworks that try to use the actual OS components always end up with terrible visual bugs due to unifying things that don't want to be unified. Or worse many "cross platform" UI frameworks try to mimic the its developer's favorite OS. I have seen way too many Android apps that has "cross platform" frameworks that draw iOS UI elements. The best way to do cross platform applications with a GUI (I specifically avoid cross platform UI) is defining a yet another platform above a very basic common layer. This is what Web had done. What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web and this is why Electron works so well for applications deployed in multiple OSes.
  - qsera 8mo ago
    > Ever used a GTK app under Windows? I have created and used them. They didn't look terrible on windows. >What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web.. I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too.. I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good...
    - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
      There's loads of funding. But the ones funding Qt and GTK aren't parties interested in things like cohesion or design standards. They just needed a way to deliver their product to the user in a faster way than maintaining 2-3 OS platform apps. Wanting that shipping velocity by its nature sacrifices the above elements. The remnants of the dotcom era for web definitely helped shape it in a more design contentious way, in comparison. Those standards are created and pushed a few layers above that in which cross platform UI's work in.
    - okanat 8mo ago
      Here is Bleachbit, a GTK3-based disk cleanup utility. It is a blurry mess and GTK3 Window headers are completely out of style and behavior with Windows. https://imgur.com/a/ruTGUaF#ntnfeCJ https://imgur.com/a/ruTGUaF#ntnfeCJ https://imgur.com/yGhgkz2 https://imgur.com/yGhgkz2 -> Comparison with another open source app Notepad3 under Windows. > I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too.. The problem is they half-ass it. Qt only does it with QML. Qt Widgets is half-half and it is a mess. Overall these do not invalidate my point though. If you want a truly cross-platform application GUI, you need to rewrite the GUI for each OS. Or you give up and write one GUI that's running on its own platform. > I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good... Indeed, Google employs some of the smartest software developers and ones with really niche skills like Behdad Esfahbod who created the best or the second best font rendering library out there. However, Qt has a company behind (a very very incompetent one, not just the library but operating a business). I have seen many commercial libraries too, they are all various shades of terrible.
mrweasel 8mo ago
In line with "the web was a mistake" I think the idea that you can create cross platform software is an equally big mistake. You can do the core functionality of your product as cross platform, to some extend, but once you hit the interaction with the OS and especially the UI libraries of the OS, I think you'd get better software if you just accept that you'll need to write multiple application. We see this on mobile, there's just two target platform really, yet companies don't even want to do that. The choice isn't surprising, in a world where companies are more concerned with saving and branding, compared to creating good products.
- asdff 8mo ago
  I've only done one platform gui work (python) but I'd guess this is stuff that is ripe for transpiling since a lot of gui code is just reusing the same boilerplate everyone is using to get the same ui patters everyone is using. Like if I make something in tkinter seems like it should be pretty straightforward to write a tool that can translate all my function calls as I've structured them into a chunk of Swift that would draw the same size window same buttons etc.
  - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
    We get into transpiling and we essentially start to rebuild yet another cross platform framework. Starts with "read this filetype and turn it into this layout" and it ends up with "we'll make sure this can deploy on X,Y,Z,W..." It'd be nice if companies could just play nice and agree on a standard interface. That's the one good thing the web managed to do. It's just stuck to what's ultimately 3 decades of tech debt from a prototype document reader made in a few weeks.
    - asdff 8mo ago
      >It'd be nice if companies could just play nice and agree on a standard interface They basically do though. Every cross platform native ported app I've used the GUI is the same layout. Well, except on macos the menu ribbon is on the topbar and windows it has its own ribbon layer in the application window. But that is it. All these frameworks already have feature parity with another. It is expected that they have these same functions and ui paradigms. Here's your button function. Here is where you specify window dimensions. This function opens a file browser. This one takes in user input to the textbox. I mean it is all pretty standardized and limited what you can expect to do in ui already.
asdff 8mo ago
There is a lot of stuff you can get done with the standard library alone of various languages that play nice on all major platforms. People tend to reach for whatever stack of dependencies is popular at the time, however.

arexxbifs 8mo ago

Visual Basic solved that. The web is in many ways a regression.

dvdkon 8mo ago
Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps, but those GUIs were rather static and limited by today's standards. People have now gotten used to responsive GUIs that resize to any window size, easy dynamic hiding of controls, and dynamic lists in any part of the GUI; you won't get them to come back to a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`.
- arexxbifs 8mo ago
  > Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps Yes, they were comfortable and easy to set up (and use), particularly when compared to web development. > a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False` This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time, _especially_ when it started replacing RAD tools like VB and Delphi. In fact, it still looks like this in many ways, except now you have a JSX property and React state for disabling the button, and a mess of complex tooling, setup and node modules just to get to that base level. The web won not because of programmer convenience, but because it offered ease of distribution. Turns out everything else was secondary.
  - dvdkon 8mo ago
    > This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time React is over a decade old, and as far as I remember, desktop apps using embedded browsers (Electron) started becoming dominant after it came out. The ease-of-distribution advantage is huge, but web technologies are big outside the Web too, where it doesn't apply. (Besides my main point, idiomatic web UIs don't implement resize handlers for positioning each element manually, but instead use CSS to declaratively create layouts. Modern GUI libraries with visual builders can also do this, but it was decidedly not the norm in the 90s. Also, modern dynamic GUIs generally don't use a static layout with disabled parts, but hide or add parts outright. That kind of dynamicity is hard to even conceptualise with a GUI builder.)

asdff 8mo ago

Are they not? Gui libraries are like button(function=myFunction). This isn't rocket surgery stuff here at least the gui tooling I've used.

m-schuetz 8mo ago
Pretty much any non-web GUI framework I tried so far has either been terrible to set up, or terrible to deploy. Or both. Electron is stupidly simple. ImGUI is the single exception that has been simple to set up, trivial to deploy (there is nothing to deploy, including it is all that's needed), and nice to use.
- asdff 8mo ago
  Tkinter is easy too.
- _aavaa_ 8mo ago
  Except ImGUI’s missing what I consider essential features for macOS: proper multitouch support (two finger panning, pinch to zoom).
  - ocornut 8mo ago
    Specifically for panning and zooming, doesn't the OS translate those inputs to mouse events, like Windows does by default? Otherwise it is simply a matter of performing this translation at the backend level.

lpcvoid 8mo ago

Man, you never used Delphi or Lazarus then. That was comfortable and easy. Web by comparison is just a jarring mess of unfounded complexity.

0dayz 8mo ago

I feel that flutter is the first right step for this, it felt like a breath of fresh air to work with compared to the webstack.