10 ms·

As a guy who works with primarily back end server code. I hate UI stuff primarily because even creating small input UI windows requires jumping though hoops of

As a guy who works with primarily back end server code. I hate UI stuff primarily because even creating small input UI windows requires jumping though hoops of fire it feels like with strange API calls, and documentation that says, "Just follow the example it'll all be fine in a couple minutes." But I'm 8 inheritance levels deep trying to figure out why my text box isn't rendering. I've often wondered why OS's just don't host browser render engines internally and draw their UI with that. Well I don't for long, I know HTML is much younger then X. Also browser engines are massive resource hogs. But with the advent of 8-16+ GB of ram in consumer computers can we really say 2-3GB for windows rendering is heavy? Especially if it offers that much empowerment to developers.

recursive 12y ago
> I've often wondered why OS's just don't host browser render engines internally and draw their UI with that. I believe Windows 8 can do this.
- barkingcat 12y ago
  Didn't Windows use to do this until they got dinged by the anti-trust suit? MSFT had to spend a lot of engineering time decoupling IE from being a critical component in rendering basic file explorer views
  - Elv13 12y ago
    And the "active" Windows desktop itself (as part of explorer.exe) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop
rancur 12y ago
no more software layers please! my PC was much faster when my programs were native. Apps rendered with chrome rendered with webkit...8GB used to be enough, then all these "developers" with their "development machines" who think it's no big deal that their Hangouts implementation takes 200MB when Pidgin takes 20. people used to complain about Firefox hogging memory, I think it's Chrome we should be worried about...
- jwcooper 12y ago
  At the same time, it's likely much more expensive to code native apps than it is to just build an html/css/js app using chrome with a lot of the heavy lifting already done for you (at the expense of increased resource consumption). A lot of these apps wouldn't exist if they couldn't have been built quickly and cheaply.
  - rancur 12y ago
    well, we're hitting process node limits (5, maybe 4nm) in 10 years so I think we better stop it. http://www.chipworks.com/media/wpmu/uploads/blogs.dir/2/files/2012/04/FIN-410K-c_branded.png http://www.chipworks.com/media/wpmu/uploads/blogs.dir/2/file... You see those little dots? Those are individual silicon atoms from one of a few fins in the gate on Intel's 22nm node. Also, I Am A C Programmer. I Think Everything Should Be Written In C. C Is Close To The Hardware And Is Faster And Use Less Resource Compared To The JavaSlow and WebKittenz and CSS. But I Like CSS Because It Has C In It. I Am A C Programmer. Get back to me when we have compressed ZRAM implementations and Same Page Merging everywhere to save memory on each Chrome process and each JS interpreter instance. Don't you want to do the green thing?
    - blt 12y ago
      I'm with you. I'm a "mechanically sympathetic" anomaly amongst my age group and even many of my senior colleagues who came up in the 90s when Moore's Law == clock speed. My whining about cache thrashing and branch mispredictions might fall on deaf ears now, but I'll be ready to fix all the slow-ass code when people realize that silicon atoms aren't getting any smaller and heat isn't getting any less hot.
      - rancur 12y ago
        you have my approval :) I've been toying with the notion of continuing to focus on embedded C since most of the Computer Science d00ds I've worked with have no clue how things work "what? the runtime takes care of it" besides O-notation.
    - 12y ago
10098 12y ago
no, screw that. My 4GB RAM machine is slow enough as it is with all this html and javascript crap running.
tracker1 12y ago
AFAIK, Windows 8, Gnome, Unity and others offer desktop html+javascript compositing with support for webservice calls. Some may be more powerful/limited, but it's something already being done. Even in a thread earlier today there was a post about the state of desktop web apps... node-webkit and atom-shell aren't bad options either. I always wanted to like XUL, but a shell mode for HTML+JS that can have more control over iframes than is allowed in the browser... it would definitely be interesting. It would be more interesting if it followed node's API (at least for JS-level modules).
- giancarlostoro 12y ago
  Game Dev Tycoon is a neat example of this. It started as a Windows 8 game developed with VS Express (using JavaScript), then it became it's own thing on Steam, not sure if they use node-webkit or what, I can't remember, but it runs smoothly on Linux and other platforms as a result.
  - Danieru 12y ago
    Game Dev Tycoon does use node-webkit. They also developed the Steam integration library for node-webkit: https://github.com/greenheartgames/greenworks https://github.com/greenheartgames/greenworks
fbender 12y ago
That's the spirit of FirefoxOS – any other prior concept still used "native" stuff while in FirefoxOS, "native" is the Web!
k00pa 12y ago
> But with the advent of 8-16+ GB of ram in consumer computers can we really say 2-3GB for windows rendering is heavy? This attitude is why we have phones with 1G of memory and 1Ghz+ CPU's lagging when just trying to read email. Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff. For example if we eat 2-3GB of memory on a system with 8GB of memory, thats over 25% of the usage. Then some applications that are actually used. (Let me use my own process mem counts here...) 1.3Gb for Firefox, 0.6Gb for Android emulator, 0.5Gb for Visual studio.... And there would have gone over half of the 8GB of ram! I am sure my current memory usage would be half of what its now if developers would actually give some shit about memory usage... Not just allocate too much memory because "there is so much memory it doesn't matter"
- joev_ 12y ago
  > Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff. I disagree. I think the point is that it's not useless, by its own existence. It saves dev time (which allows more - and better! - programs to be built), it allows richer features and interactions, it lowers the barrier to entry for maintenance work, and most of all prevents constant re-inventing/implementing the wheel, which is reflected to the user in a lack of many common types of bugs, annoyances, and accessibility issues.
  - com2kid 12y ago
    I'd argue against it saving dev time. See my above comment, HTML+CSS is not the fastest way to design an app. If it is all you know then yes, it is faster, but inherently it is not a /good/ system. It gets worse even faster if you add JS to the mix!
    - kristiandupont 12y ago
      I think it's a great system. It's surely the fastest way for me personally, in spite of it not being "all I know". With Bootstrap or Foundation, you need very little code to make something look nice, there is great documentation and lots of online resources.
slezakattack 12y ago
Windows Presentation Foundation does just this with the XAML markup language. It's almost like designing a web app. You can use this markup for designing windows phone apps. I'm sure Apple also has their own markup as well for developing desktop/mobile apps but I have no experience in this so I'm not completely sure.
- Animats 12y ago
  Windows Presentation Foundation does just this with the XAML markup language. Mozilla does that with XUL. That's what they're trying to get rid of.
com2kid 12y ago
> I've often wondered why OS's just don't host browser render engines internally and draw their UI with that. CSS is, by far, not a good way to try and do UIs. It sort of works, and it is getting better, but it started out with lots of legacy cruft and things have only gotten worse. One can make any sort of layout imaginable in any of the modern UI frameworks within a few hours. Want 3 columns boxes at a precise position in CSS? Well thankfully the latest version of the spec has support for that, but up until very recently.... But for code running on the platform, you can take any 1st year CS student who has passed a class or two and have them put that sort of app together in Swing. WPF is a bit more work due to the data binding magic, ignoring that the layout stuff is also incredibly easy! On the web, getting data is the easy part, making the UI is the hard part. On the PC, getting the data is the hard part, putting the UI together is easy! Compare the richness of apps even on mobile phones to what you get in the browser. Sure if you hire top notch web developers who have been studying web development for 3+ years you can get something that is just like an app, but holy crap. tl;dr HTML+CSS is the Win32 of layout engines.
- dreen 12y ago
  I agree with this, despite that as a web developer I have written most interfaces in my life in CSS. I did, however, have brief exposure to various native toolkits in Java and would love to see a proper constrained-based scene graph in the browser. CSS is good for styling but not for layouts.
  - err4nt 12y ago
    Im workong on having a plugin built that will give us the flexibility of constraint-based control in CSS but in a way that makes more sense to the CSS way of doing things. I want to build unbreakable responsive lauouts!
yAnonymous 12y ago
HTML+CSS are better than any other layout engine and if the performance is good enough to make apps for mobile devices, it's good enough for any system. Why spend time on other UI systems that will only end up requiring more work for a visually worse result?

recursive 12y ago

> I've often wondered why OS's just don't host browser render engines internally and draw their UI with that. I believe Windows 8 can do this.

barkingcat 12y ago
Didn't Windows use to do this until they got dinged by the anti-trust suit? MSFT had to spend a lot of engineering time decoupling IE from being a critical component in rendering basic file explorer views
- Elv13 12y ago
  And the "active" Windows desktop itself (as part of explorer.exe) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

rancur 12y ago

no more software layers please! my PC was much faster when my programs were native. Apps rendered with chrome rendered with webkit...8GB used to be enough, then all these "developers" with their "development machines" who think it's no big deal that their Hangouts implementation takes 200MB when Pidgin takes 20. people used to complain about Firefox hogging memory, I think it's Chrome we should be worried about...

jwcooper 12y ago
At the same time, it's likely much more expensive to code native apps than it is to just build an html/css/js app using chrome with a lot of the heavy lifting already done for you (at the expense of increased resource consumption). A lot of these apps wouldn't exist if they couldn't have been built quickly and cheaply.
- rancur 12y ago
  well, we're hitting process node limits (5, maybe 4nm) in 10 years so I think we better stop it. http://www.chipworks.com/media/wpmu/uploads/blogs.dir/2/files/2012/04/FIN-410K-c_branded.png http://www.chipworks.com/media/wpmu/uploads/blogs.dir/2/file... You see those little dots? Those are individual silicon atoms from one of a few fins in the gate on Intel's 22nm node. Also, I Am A C Programmer. I Think Everything Should Be Written In C. C Is Close To The Hardware And Is Faster And Use Less Resource Compared To The JavaSlow and WebKittenz and CSS. But I Like CSS Because It Has C In It. I Am A C Programmer. Get back to me when we have compressed ZRAM implementations and Same Page Merging everywhere to save memory on each Chrome process and each JS interpreter instance. Don't you want to do the green thing?
  - blt 12y ago
    I'm with you. I'm a "mechanically sympathetic" anomaly amongst my age group and even many of my senior colleagues who came up in the 90s when Moore's Law == clock speed. My whining about cache thrashing and branch mispredictions might fall on deaf ears now, but I'll be ready to fix all the slow-ass code when people realize that silicon atoms aren't getting any smaller and heat isn't getting any less hot.
    - rancur 12y ago
      you have my approval :) I've been toying with the notion of continuing to focus on embedded C since most of the Computer Science d00ds I've worked with have no clue how things work "what? the runtime takes care of it" besides O-notation.
  - 12y ago

10098 12y ago

no, screw that. My 4GB RAM machine is slow enough as it is with all this html and javascript crap running.

tracker1 12y ago

AFAIK, Windows 8, Gnome, Unity and others offer desktop html+javascript compositing with support for webservice calls. Some may be more powerful/limited, but it's something already being done. Even in a thread earlier today there was a post about the state of desktop web apps... node-webkit and atom-shell aren't bad options either. I always wanted to like XUL, but a shell mode for HTML+JS that can have more control over iframes than is allowed in the browser... it would definitely be interesting. It would be more interesting if it followed node's API (at least for JS-level modules).

giancarlostoro 12y ago
Game Dev Tycoon is a neat example of this. It started as a Windows 8 game developed with VS Express (using JavaScript), then it became it's own thing on Steam, not sure if they use node-webkit or what, I can't remember, but it runs smoothly on Linux and other platforms as a result.
- Danieru 12y ago
  Game Dev Tycoon does use node-webkit. They also developed the Steam integration library for node-webkit: https://github.com/greenheartgames/greenworks https://github.com/greenheartgames/greenworks

fbender 12y ago

That's the spirit of FirefoxOS – any other prior concept still used "native" stuff while in FirefoxOS, "native" is the Web!

k00pa 12y ago

> But with the advent of 8-16+ GB of ram in consumer computers can we really say 2-3GB for windows rendering is heavy? This attitude is why we have phones with 1G of memory and 1Ghz+ CPU's lagging when just trying to read email. Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff. For example if we eat 2-3GB of memory on a system with 8GB of memory, thats over 25% of the usage. Then some applications that are actually used. (Let me use my own process mem counts here...) 1.3Gb for Firefox, 0.6Gb for Android emulator, 0.5Gb for Visual studio.... And there would have gone over half of the 8GB of ram! I am sure my current memory usage would be half of what its now if developers would actually give some shit about memory usage... Not just allocate too much memory because "there is so much memory it doesn't matter"

joev_ 12y ago
> Yes, there is more memory available than before, but that doesn't mean we should just waste it for useless stuff. I disagree. I think the point is that it's not useless, by its own existence. It saves dev time (which allows more - and better! - programs to be built), it allows richer features and interactions, it lowers the barrier to entry for maintenance work, and most of all prevents constant re-inventing/implementing the wheel, which is reflected to the user in a lack of many common types of bugs, annoyances, and accessibility issues.
- com2kid 12y ago
  I'd argue against it saving dev time. See my above comment, HTML+CSS is not the fastest way to design an app. If it is all you know then yes, it is faster, but inherently it is not a /good/ system. It gets worse even faster if you add JS to the mix!
  - kristiandupont 12y ago
    I think it's a great system. It's surely the fastest way for me personally, in spite of it not being "all I know". With Bootstrap or Foundation, you need very little code to make something look nice, there is great documentation and lots of online resources.

slezakattack 12y ago

Windows Presentation Foundation does just this with the XAML markup language. It's almost like designing a web app. You can use this markup for designing windows phone apps. I'm sure Apple also has their own markup as well for developing desktop/mobile apps but I have no experience in this so I'm not completely sure.

Animats 12y ago
Windows Presentation Foundation does just this with the XAML markup language. Mozilla does that with XUL. That's what they're trying to get rid of.

com2kid 12y ago

> I've often wondered why OS's just don't host browser render engines internally and draw their UI with that. CSS is, by far, not a good way to try and do UIs. It sort of works, and it is getting better, but it started out with lots of legacy cruft and things have only gotten worse. One can make any sort of layout imaginable in any of the modern UI frameworks within a few hours. Want 3 columns boxes at a precise position in CSS? Well thankfully the latest version of the spec has support for that, but up until very recently.... But for code running on the platform, you can take any 1st year CS student who has passed a class or two and have them put that sort of app together in Swing. WPF is a bit more work due to the data binding magic, ignoring that the layout stuff is also incredibly easy! On the web, getting data is the easy part, making the UI is the hard part. On the PC, getting the data is the hard part, putting the UI together is easy! Compare the richness of apps even on mobile phones to what you get in the browser. Sure if you hire top notch web developers who have been studying web development for 3+ years you can get something that is just like an app, but holy crap. tl;dr HTML+CSS is the Win32 of layout engines.

dreen 12y ago
I agree with this, despite that as a web developer I have written most interfaces in my life in CSS. I did, however, have brief exposure to various native toolkits in Java and would love to see a proper constrained-based scene graph in the browser. CSS is good for styling but not for layouts.
- err4nt 12y ago
  Im workong on having a plugin built that will give us the flexibility of constraint-based control in CSS but in a way that makes more sense to the CSS way of doing things. I want to build unbreakable responsive lauouts!

yAnonymous 12y ago

HTML+CSS are better than any other layout engine and if the performance is good enough to make apps for mobile devices, it's good enough for any system. Why spend time on other UI systems that will only end up requiring more work for a visually worse result?