15 ms·

Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the pro

by fizk 11y ago

Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and push the envelope. And mimicking native can often lead to bad results. But to go from that and say that we shouldn’t try. That’s just sad.

pjc50 11y ago
Youtube is an interesting choice of example, since in a way it's "just documents" - those documents happen to be video, and are surrounded by hyperlinks to other video's pages. The real achievement here was cutting through the intellectual property thicket so that everyone could have an in-browser video player in HTML5. The first site I ever saw that used Javascript to produce a useful application rather than annoying frippery was Google Maps. (Rhetorical question: why does everyone use youtube rather than hosting videos on their own sites? Unpacking this question will show the obstacles that "redecentralisation" faces)
- nivla 11y ago
  >why does everyone use youtube rather than hosting videos on their own sites? Unpacking this question will show the obstacles that "redecentralisation" faces Two reasons: Bandwidth and Speed. Google has contracts with most major ISP's for caching Youtube videos. This gives them access to the best CDN money can buy! No matter how awesome or powerful your current datacenter/CDN is, it still wouldn't be able to match the fetch-straight-from-the-ISP performance. Interestingly this also creates a hidden monopoly since the barrier to entry is costly.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    It's more than that. There's also legal liability (very few people would be comfortable hosting the amount of pirated content that appears on YouTube, nor would they have personal bandwidth for DMCA takedown requests), discoverability (YouTube recommends content you've never seen before, intelligently...by definition a personal site can't do this), and search (which only works when you have enough content to be worthwhile to search over). All of the algorithms used for the latter two points require a good amount of data, so Google gets large economies of scale there.
Grue3 11y ago
>Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. Flash DRM replaced with another closed source DRM. No progress whatsoever. And now it has embedded in the browser itself, greatly increasing its vulnerability.
coldtea 11y ago
>Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. What exactly is incredible about YouTube today (apart from it being a huge repository of videos, of course)? That it almost works like a 2000 era video player, only slower and clunkier? The new fangled DRM? That it can bring a decent computer to its knees with the fans blaring playing HD video? The automatic non-skippable ads?
- pcwalton 11y ago
  Discoverability, and elimination of the downloading friction. YouTube is about as proven as you can get. The fact is that it didn't just edge past 2000-era video players in popularity, it totally trounced them. I think we should try to figure out why that is instead of arguing against YouTube's viability—it's about a decade too late for the latter.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >The fact is that it didn't just edge past 2000-era video players in popularity, it totally trounced them. How many people watch movies on YouTube? Because that's what video players are used for, not for small videos, music clips and curios. >I think we should try to figure out why that is instead of arguing against YouTube's viability—it's about a decade too late for the latter. We were talking about it's performance compared to native, not it's viability. YouTube rules as a huge video repository. Other "web" apps that don't have that stronghold, don't fare so well compared to their native counterparts, especially on mobile.
- haberman 11y ago
  > That it almost works like a 2000 era video player, only slower and clunkier? What are you even talking about? If you click on a YouTube link, a video your computer has never seen before is playing in less than five seconds, streaming over the internet. You can instantly seek to any part of the video, even if it hours long. You can speed it up to 2x, or slow it down to 0.25x, without changing the pitch of the sound. If you have a Chromecast, you can display the video on your TV instead. Nothing in 2000 had a remotely similar feature set.
the8472 11y ago
> Look at a site like YouTube today. And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback. Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer. There even are addons to export YT playlists to VLC and stream them. pdfjs is great. but every 3rd scientific paper I read tends to be somewhat broken (missing diagrams/images) or sometimes fails to render completely. native readers provide a better experience and better render times. >And mimicking native can often lead to bad results. But to go from that and say that we shouldn’t try. Maybe sometimes it would be better to provide better integration with native applications? Native applications and browsers really don't like talking to each other.
- mreiland 11y ago
  > Maybe sometimes it would be better to provide better integration with native applications? That's it exactly. The author claims it's an unsolved problem, I think it's the inevitable solution (that web and native will merge).
  - jsingleton 11y ago
    You can always use custom protocols much like mailto: e.g. a link with sms: can send a text message from a mobile web browser.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      Or Android intents, whereby applications can intercept particular URL schemes to e.g. play Youtube videos in the app rather than in the browser.
    - mreiland 11y ago
      misses the point by a mile. web and native will eventually merge to the point that for most intents and purposes the user can't distinguish between them. It'll never be perfect, but it'll be "good enough", that whether an app comes from the web or from the HD, the user won't really notice except perhaps in the initial startup time, and probably not even then (everyone expects to "install" an app).
webtards 11y ago
The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and tag hell to support said shitty frameworks and having to deploy massive fuuckton heavy sites for a simple blog post. It also sucks hard for the end users : they can see their whole months mobile data allowance get pissed away on a couple of bling websites. It can takes ages now for modern site to finally work as it downloads so much shite. Some big name sites used to render quicker five or ten years ago. At least in the past, you could turn off scripting, images and styling and get to the basic content, but not even that works now due to crap developers. It all sucks. Diseased turtles all the way down.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Sure. And you're also made out of meat and will die soon. And we're living on a planet that is in the long term doomed even if we half-evolved, tool-using monkeys get our shit together. (Did you know that we're half-way through the lifespan of forests? [1] That one day the conditions just won't be right for them anymore? That never fails to sadden me.) But the interesting thing to me is what happens when we move past the existential despair that comes when we first recognize the true nature of things. Sure, things are fucked, but they always have been. What's next? When I was as bitter as you sound here, I took a break. Burnout sucks. But eventually I found myself coming back to technology because it's my best chance to make the world suck slightly less. Or, put more accurately, to shift it in the direction of my irrationally high ideals. So maybe take a break? Go hike the Pacific Crest Trail or work on a goat farm or something. You're not going to help anybody, yourself included, by soaking in something you hate indiscriminately. At least rest until you can come back and focus your hate in a laser-like beam on one particularly awful thing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth
  - corndoge 11y ago
    He didn't say all technology is diseased. He was talking about the web. Writing native applications is still as fun as it has always been. Not that there isn't disease there too, but it isn't scripted and marked up to hell like the technostew that is the current web, which is what the parent was describing.
lloeki 11y ago
> It’s not for every site to try and push the envelope. And mimicking native can often lead to bad results. But to go from that and say that we shouldn’t try. That’s just sad. The article says exactly that! It just says we shouldn't shoehorn native stuff into the web (e.g look at Synology's UI mimicking a nested desktop and windows). > We shouldn’t try to compete with native apps in terms set by the native apps. Instead, we should concentrate on the unique web selling points: its reach, which, more or less by definition, encompasses all native platforms, URLs, which are fantastically useful and don’t work in a native environment, and its hassle-free quality. Youtube example perfectly fits that bill. Yet there is also a critical difference to be made between "the web" and "web technology": while the former is operated in a browser, platforms such as Electron leading to apps such as Atom or Slack that totally don't try to mimic the native platform they're running on, powering cross-platform applications that nonetheless do try hard to respect† the platform they're running on, achieving something Java's cross-platform WORA GUI toolkit thoroughly failed to††. † there's a clear, visible boundary between the native system and the webtech app, but that boundary is easily crossed, whereas historically we've been trying to erase the boundary and pretend it doesn't exist, only to veer straight into an uncanny valley. †† dare I say Firefox sits right there too, forever battling the tide of mimicking native components with each OS release, from UI elements appearance (vanishing scrollbar, input fields...) to behaviour (non-"sheet" modal windows on OS X), in subtle but aggravating ways, if only because it erodes the product's image and detracts development resources from other efforts.
Fr0styMatt8 11y ago
It's interesting that you mention YouTube, because the thing that finally convinced me that a 'web app' could be indistinguishable from a native app was YouTube's Leanback interface (YouTube TV). Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/tv https://www.youtube.com/tv Video player functionality aside (I understand the complaints), that thing full-screened just feels like a native app.
- lgieron 11y ago
  For me, it was the Netflix web client. Feels 100% as smooth as a good native app.
  - nivla 11y ago
    >For me, it was the Netflix web client. Feels 100% as smooth as a good native app. You mean when they were using silverlight or now when they are using HTML5?
- Dewie3 11y ago
  > YouTube on TV is not supported on this device? Is it only for mobile? I didn't see any "mob" or something in the URL. Anyway, with regards to being indistinguishable from native, I guess there is nothing quite like being reminded that you are "native" than an app complaining that you are on the wrong native device. :-)
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Works fine on Ubuntu desktop, vivid, [EDIT:] chrome.
    - Dewie3 11y ago
      Just not on mine. :-) (with Firefox)
  - morb 11y ago
    Works in Chromium on Linux for me. In Firefox (my default br.) the message is: "Youtube on TV is not supported on this device, for more info go to: www.youtube.com/devicepartners" which is unclickable and unselectable. Modern web...
pswenson 11y ago
sadly and inexplicably, youtube still uses flash for video on the desktop...
- kuboa 11y ago
  They had HTML5 video as a beta option for quite a while, and actually dropped Flash in favor of it as the default player about 4 months ago: http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7926001/youtube-drops-flash-for-html5-video-default http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7926001/youtube-drops-flas...
- the8472 11y ago
  check https://www.youtube.com/html5 https://www.youtube.com/html5 I get full <video> playback capability in FF nightly on windows and linux
smrtinsert 11y ago
Youtube is the first thing I point to apps on my mobile devices... Why would you ask your phone to dl megs of crap everytime instead of having instant video load? Over the chain of ownership of any website I would say starting out trying to mimic a native experience will inevitably lead to a bad UX. Maybe not at first but it will. Part of the reason I use HN as a web site on my phone/tab is because it doesn't try to get fancy and just gives me a great web experience. Shocker.
stcredzero 11y ago
You can spin this either way. Clearly, the web is just another UI for "your data." It's going to have a different set of tradeoffs than native or mobile. Why not just use tools for what they are the best at? MPlayer can kick the pants off of YouTube in some contexts. Likewise, MPlayer wouldn't be viable for a vast number of YouTube use cases. I can benefit tremendously from using both Audacity and SoundCloud. Why does one have to "win?"
wahsd 11y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here, but I don't think the argument is to cede the web to documents, but I also don't think the idea is to cede all functionality to apps. I think the problem is the hype about native apps and everyone wanting an app without understanding their purposes, utility, and unique characteristics. There are situations where a web app / site is the exceedingly more appropriate solution, but there are other uses where a native app is equally exceedingly more appropriate. The problem is that people are having a difficult time discerning the two and the appropriateness of each. I don't agree with this article and the sentiment about the critical question being whether people want your icon on their homescreen as being the differentiating characteristic. What is not discussed is the possibility for putting the icon on the home screen as a link to a web view that can function the way a native app can function. It even addresses a question regarding distribution if you simply ask your user whether they want to "install" or add an icon to their homescreen to install your "app" / web app / site. It can be designed in such a fashion that it is indistinguishable from a native app of a certain type that has rather narrow requirements.
marssaxman 11y ago
I'm not sure we'd be missing out; the abandonment of the document model has cost the web much of its democratic, decentralized usefulness, and it still isn't a very good application platform no matter how hard people try to make it act like one.
jjtheblunt 11y ago
Are you kidding? YouTube is displaying a binary format, not ridiculous html, rendered by _native_ code integrated into the browser.

by fizk 11y ago

pjc50 11y ago

Youtube is an interesting choice of example, since in a way it's "just documents" - those documents happen to be video, and are surrounded by hyperlinks to other video's pages. The real achievement here was cutting through the intellectual property thicket so that everyone could have an in-browser video player in HTML5. The first site I ever saw that used Javascript to produce a useful application rather than annoying frippery was Google Maps. (Rhetorical question: why does everyone use youtube rather than hosting videos on their own sites? Unpacking this question will show the obstacles that "redecentralisation" faces)

nivla 11y ago
>why does everyone use youtube rather than hosting videos on their own sites? Unpacking this question will show the obstacles that "redecentralisation" faces Two reasons: Bandwidth and Speed. Google has contracts with most major ISP's for caching Youtube videos. This gives them access to the best CDN money can buy! No matter how awesome or powerful your current datacenter/CDN is, it still wouldn't be able to match the fetch-straight-from-the-ISP performance. Interestingly this also creates a hidden monopoly since the barrier to entry is costly.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  It's more than that. There's also legal liability (very few people would be comfortable hosting the amount of pirated content that appears on YouTube, nor would they have personal bandwidth for DMCA takedown requests), discoverability (YouTube recommends content you've never seen before, intelligently...by definition a personal site can't do this), and search (which only works when you have enough content to be worthwhile to search over). All of the algorithms used for the latter two points require a good amount of data, so Google gets large economies of scale there.

Grue3 11y ago

>Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. Flash DRM replaced with another closed source DRM. No progress whatsoever. And now it has embedded in the browser itself, greatly increasing its vulnerability.

coldtea 11y ago

>Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. What exactly is incredible about YouTube today (apart from it being a huge repository of videos, of course)? That it almost works like a 2000 era video player, only slower and clunkier? The new fangled DRM? That it can bring a decent computer to its knees with the fans blaring playing HD video? The automatic non-skippable ads?

pcwalton 11y ago
Discoverability, and elimination of the downloading friction. YouTube is about as proven as you can get. The fact is that it didn't just edge past 2000-era video players in popularity, it totally trounced them. I think we should try to figure out why that is instead of arguing against YouTube's viability—it's about a decade too late for the latter.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >The fact is that it didn't just edge past 2000-era video players in popularity, it totally trounced them. How many people watch movies on YouTube? Because that's what video players are used for, not for small videos, music clips and curios. >I think we should try to figure out why that is instead of arguing against YouTube's viability—it's about a decade too late for the latter. We were talking about it's performance compared to native, not it's viability. YouTube rules as a huge video repository. Other "web" apps that don't have that stronghold, don't fare so well compared to their native counterparts, especially on mobile.
haberman 11y ago
> That it almost works like a 2000 era video player, only slower and clunkier? What are you even talking about? If you click on a YouTube link, a video your computer has never seen before is playing in less than five seconds, streaming over the internet. You can instantly seek to any part of the video, even if it hours long. You can speed it up to 2x, or slow it down to 0.25x, without changing the pitch of the sound. If you have a Chromecast, you can display the video on your TV instead. Nothing in 2000 had a remotely similar feature set.

the8472 11y ago

> Look at a site like YouTube today. And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback. Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer. There even are addons to export YT playlists to VLC and stream them. pdfjs is great. but every 3rd scientific paper I read tends to be somewhat broken (missing diagrams/images) or sometimes fails to render completely. native readers provide a better experience and better render times. >And mimicking native can often lead to bad results. But to go from that and say that we shouldn’t try. Maybe sometimes it would be better to provide better integration with native applications? Native applications and browsers really don't like talking to each other.

mreiland 11y ago
> Maybe sometimes it would be better to provide better integration with native applications? That's it exactly. The author claims it's an unsolved problem, I think it's the inevitable solution (that web and native will merge).
- jsingleton 11y ago
  You can always use custom protocols much like mailto: e.g. a link with sms: can send a text message from a mobile web browser.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Or Android intents, whereby applications can intercept particular URL schemes to e.g. play Youtube videos in the app rather than in the browser.
  - mreiland 11y ago
    misses the point by a mile. web and native will eventually merge to the point that for most intents and purposes the user can't distinguish between them. It'll never be perfect, but it'll be "good enough", that whether an app comes from the web or from the HD, the user won't really notice except perhaps in the initial startup time, and probably not even then (everyone expects to "install" an app).

webtards 11y ago

The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and tag hell to support said shitty frameworks and having to deploy massive fuuckton heavy sites for a simple blog post. It also sucks hard for the end users : they can see their whole months mobile data allowance get pissed away on a couple of bling websites. It can takes ages now for modern site to finally work as it downloads so much shite. Some big name sites used to render quicker five or ten years ago. At least in the past, you could turn off scripting, images and styling and get to the basic content, but not even that works now due to crap developers. It all sucks. Diseased turtles all the way down.

wpietri 11y ago
Sure. And you're also made out of meat and will die soon. And we're living on a planet that is in the long term doomed even if we half-evolved, tool-using monkeys get our shit together. (Did you know that we're half-way through the lifespan of forests? [1] That one day the conditions just won't be right for them anymore? That never fails to sadden me.) But the interesting thing to me is what happens when we move past the existential despair that comes when we first recognize the true nature of things. Sure, things are fucked, but they always have been. What's next? When I was as bitter as you sound here, I took a break. Burnout sucks. But eventually I found myself coming back to technology because it's my best chance to make the world suck slightly less. Or, put more accurately, to shift it in the direction of my irrationally high ideals. So maybe take a break? Go hike the Pacific Crest Trail or work on a goat farm or something. You're not going to help anybody, yourself included, by soaking in something you hate indiscriminately. At least rest until you can come back and focus your hate in a laser-like beam on one particularly awful thing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth
- corndoge 11y ago
  He didn't say all technology is diseased. He was talking about the web. Writing native applications is still as fun as it has always been. Not that there isn't disease there too, but it isn't scripted and marked up to hell like the technostew that is the current web, which is what the parent was describing.

lloeki 11y ago

> It’s not for every site to try and push the envelope. And mimicking native can often lead to bad results. But to go from that and say that we shouldn’t try. That’s just sad. The article says exactly that! It just says we shouldn't shoehorn native stuff into the web (e.g look at Synology's UI mimicking a nested desktop and windows). > We shouldn’t try to compete with native apps in terms set by the native apps. Instead, we should concentrate on the unique web selling points: its reach, which, more or less by definition, encompasses all native platforms, URLs, which are fantastically useful and don’t work in a native environment, and its hassle-free quality. Youtube example perfectly fits that bill. Yet there is also a critical difference to be made between "the web" and "web technology": while the former is operated in a browser, platforms such as Electron leading to apps such as Atom or Slack that totally don't try to mimic the native platform they're running on, powering cross-platform applications that nonetheless do try hard to respect† the platform they're running on, achieving something Java's cross-platform WORA GUI toolkit thoroughly failed to††. † there's a clear, visible boundary between the native system and the webtech app, but that boundary is easily crossed, whereas historically we've been trying to erase the boundary and pretend it doesn't exist, only to veer straight into an uncanny valley. †† dare I say Firefox sits right there too, forever battling the tide of mimicking native components with each OS release, from UI elements appearance (vanishing scrollbar, input fields...) to behaviour (non-"sheet" modal windows on OS X), in subtle but aggravating ways, if only because it erodes the product's image and detracts development resources from other efforts.

Fr0styMatt8 11y ago

It's interesting that you mention YouTube, because the thing that finally convinced me that a 'web app' could be indistinguishable from a native app was YouTube's Leanback interface (YouTube TV). Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/tv https://www.youtube.com/tv Video player functionality aside (I understand the complaints), that thing full-screened just feels like a native app.

lgieron 11y ago
For me, it was the Netflix web client. Feels 100% as smooth as a good native app.
- nivla 11y ago
  >For me, it was the Netflix web client. Feels 100% as smooth as a good native app. You mean when they were using silverlight or now when they are using HTML5?
Dewie3 11y ago
> YouTube on TV is not supported on this device? Is it only for mobile? I didn't see any "mob" or something in the URL. Anyway, with regards to being indistinguishable from native, I guess there is nothing quite like being reminded that you are "native" than an app complaining that you are on the wrong native device. :-)
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Works fine on Ubuntu desktop, vivid, [EDIT:] chrome.
  - Dewie3 11y ago
    Just not on mine. :-) (with Firefox)
- morb 11y ago
  Works in Chromium on Linux for me. In Firefox (my default br.) the message is: "Youtube on TV is not supported on this device, for more info go to: www.youtube.com/devicepartners" which is unclickable and unselectable. Modern web...

pswenson 11y ago

sadly and inexplicably, youtube still uses flash for video on the desktop...

kuboa 11y ago
They had HTML5 video as a beta option for quite a while, and actually dropped Flash in favor of it as the default player about 4 months ago: http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7926001/youtube-drops-flash-for-html5-video-default http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7926001/youtube-drops-flas...
the8472 11y ago
check https://www.youtube.com/html5 https://www.youtube.com/html5 I get full <video> playback capability in FF nightly on windows and linux

smrtinsert 11y ago

Youtube is the first thing I point to apps on my mobile devices... Why would you ask your phone to dl megs of crap everytime instead of having instant video load? Over the chain of ownership of any website I would say starting out trying to mimic a native experience will inevitably lead to a bad UX. Maybe not at first but it will. Part of the reason I use HN as a web site on my phone/tab is because it doesn't try to get fancy and just gives me a great web experience. Shocker.

stcredzero 11y ago

You can spin this either way. Clearly, the web is just another UI for "your data." It's going to have a different set of tradeoffs than native or mobile. Why not just use tools for what they are the best at? MPlayer can kick the pants off of YouTube in some contexts. Likewise, MPlayer wouldn't be viable for a vast number of YouTube use cases. I can benefit tremendously from using both Audacity and SoundCloud. Why does one have to "win?"

wahsd 11y ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here, but I don't think the argument is to cede the web to documents, but I also don't think the idea is to cede all functionality to apps. I think the problem is the hype about native apps and everyone wanting an app without understanding their purposes, utility, and unique characteristics. There are situations where a web app / site is the exceedingly more appropriate solution, but there are other uses where a native app is equally exceedingly more appropriate. The problem is that people are having a difficult time discerning the two and the appropriateness of each. I don't agree with this article and the sentiment about the critical question being whether people want your icon on their homescreen as being the differentiating characteristic. What is not discussed is the possibility for putting the icon on the home screen as a link to a web view that can function the way a native app can function. It even addresses a question regarding distribution if you simply ask your user whether they want to "install" or add an icon to their homescreen to install your "app" / web app / site. It can be designed in such a fashion that it is indistinguishable from a native app of a certain type that has rather narrow requirements.

marssaxman 11y ago

I'm not sure we'd be missing out; the abandonment of the document model has cost the web much of its democratic, decentralized usefulness, and it still isn't a very good application platform no matter how hard people try to make it act like one.

jjtheblunt 11y ago

Are you kidding? YouTube is displaying a binary format, not ridiculous html, rendered by _native_ code integrated into the browser.