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> But why do web developers want navigation transitions? In order to emulate native apps, of course. If we're doing unpopular opinion time, I think this is the

by ixtli 11y ago

> But why do web developers want navigation transitions? In order to emulate native apps, of course. If we're doing unpopular opinion time, I think this is the real issue that no one wants to talk about. I'm all for whatever feature development the community can standardize. Apple, google, mozilla, and etc. all have smart people working for them and when they cooperate things seem to work out fine. The problem is trying to achieve the feel of native applications in a _non_ native application. Browsers should do one thing well, but that one thing has no real business being duplication of mathematica, quake, or visual studio. It's always interesting to see a Show HN where someone cleverly gets an approximation of one or another of those things running in the browser, but come on. Making the browser the operating system is simply going to push the same old incompatibility problems into the browser. It's not going to solve them.

tutuca 11y ago
If you read further they link to a previous post that covers just that: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/05/web_vs_native_l.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/05/web_vs_nativ...
rtpg 11y ago
I'm sorry but how would making browsers the operating system cause the incompatability problems to reappear? I think this is massively ignoring the realities: - there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment - There's a standard for most things happening in a browser, which means that things look pixel-perfectly the same on a huge amount of browsers. Differences among current browsers are more among performance and experimental features So currently, if Google, Apple, and MSFT decided to jointly ban all native apps and only have a web browser on their smartphones, we would have a much better compatability situation, since so much functionality has been standardised on that end, and _actually respected_. The browser is basically what the JVM tried to be, a write once work anywhere solution that is pretty well sandboxed. It's miles better than pretty much every other cross-platform piece of tooling in existence.
- pikzen 11y ago
  >there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment Xamarin.Forms is the closest I can think of. Qt too, kind of. >The browser is basically what the JVM tried to be, a write once work anywhere solution that is pretty well sandboxed. It's miles better than pretty much every other cross-platform piece of tooling in existence. It's true, the browser succeeded as a working everywhere JVM equivalent. It also succeeded at reimplementing half of your OS features, being another massive source of security issues, being inefficient with resources (chrome memory usage lol), having piss poor perfomance and locking everything to Javascript. Compiling to Javascript is not a solution. A proper bytecode is. Which we may have with WebAssembly as soon as it's implemented and the standard respected by browser builders (which will probably be around 2040). Until Google decides to add a new WA feature that's incompatible with other browsers because that's what Google does. Let's not get started on the fact that HTML is a terrible language for UIs and that any Javascript based solution is not a solution at all (i.e. React is still crap, as is Meteor and javascript.framework.of.the.day.js). The web as an application delivery medium is a failed experiment, patched up on all sides and held together with 40MB of polyfills on every page. > if Google, Apple, and MSFT decided to jointly ban all native apps and only have a web browser on their smartphones, we would have a much better compatability situation, since so much functionality has been standardised on that end, and _actually respected_. 1. We've been hoping to get at least TWO browser vendors to fully collaborate for the last 20 years and it has not happened. It won't happen. 2. Performance will still be crap. 3. I'd rather not get locked to Google's piss poor record of updating the stock Android browser. In fact, I'd rather not get locked to Google's piss poor software at all, thank you very much. The same argument applies to Apple and Microsoft. Safari is awful, and so is IE/Edge.
  - apalmer 11y ago
    I get where your coming from, and agree with a lot of what you say. BUT, Fundamentally... >The web as an application delivery medium is a failed experiment, patched up on all sides and held together with 40MB of polyfills on every page. Is just not a true statement. Or rather, the web sucks, but it is the only cross platform UI experiment that has 'worked' on any significant level.
digi_owl 11y ago
Back before the PC, didn't IBM and some other mainframe companies try to lease out terminals? This in that you could get a terminal on your home desk, that either via dedicated line or basic dialup would connect to a mainframe where you paid minute or something? In a sense the web browser, and SaaS, has become a reinvention of that...
- zhte415 11y ago
  Still do, big business. Any data dependent system. Reuters / Bloomberg / Datastream. Rented out terminals of a centralized system.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Ah yes, Bloomberg. Recently heard about those terminals in relation to someone using their service as something of a luxury Craigslist...
  - immibis 11y ago
    With data dependent systems, I assume you pay for access to the data, not just for the ability to use a computer.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing A popular (for the time) example of this type of service was CompuServe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe). I had my first online experience connecting to CompuServe on my family's home PC, back in 1985.
dgreensp 11y ago
I don't associate "navigation transitions" with native apps. What native apps have navigation transitions? I think the iPod really popularized sliding screens and the like, and they spread to mobile. The feature for web browsers makes sense as progressive enhancement. Instead of using a "tool" (library), you just say "use this transition" and if the browser supports it, it does.
rco8786 11y ago
I think this is shortsighted. In 5-10 years browsers will be more Virtual Machine than Web Browser. You can almost argue that they already are. As browsers and phones get more and more performant, the idea of emulating native apps in the browser won't have the performance stigma attached to it. This same thing played out with Java et. al. It was dismissed for being non-performant when compared to C/C++(aka native code) because it ran inside a heavy VM but nowadays the performance is just fine for an enormous amount of applications because the virtual machines and hardware got faster.
- VLM 11y ago
  Probably will be more like a URL link aware VNC viewer. That has some interesting implications for the back end WRT emulation.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Oh, so a dumb terminal. Ok. It's 1980 again.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    If it can do everything the user wants then what is the issue? Just because it's been done before it's the wrong answer?
    - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
      My reply was a bit ambiguous and snarky. I don't believe it's the wrong answer if it works. But people are commenting about moving the web forward to run apps in browsers and all and so there are parallels with what we did in the 80's. That's really what I was getting at. Nothing in computing is ever really new.
      - jmagoon 11y ago
        We're replacing a very nice custom SCO Unix backend developed at my work from 1980s onward (drops users into custom shell, multiple programs execute in the user context, leverages all the nice features of *nix) with a purchased desktop Windows ERP application and it makes me so sad. Literally we will move from having 1 to 2 admin who can manage 300 users, decades of automation, and totally instantaneous program execution (in C) with heavy user load on a single server to distributed, client based programs running on separate machines that all have to be patched, updated, troubleshot, etc.--(and the 5 person support team that has to go with it), communicating with a central program server and separate DB servers, etc.,etc., all because the console application is "too old looking".
wmeredith 11y ago
> But why do web developers want navigation transitions? In order to emulate native apps, of course. This is just a misunderstanding of good UI. Emulating native apps is NOT inherently "Good". There are terrible native apps and great ones. Navigation transitions would be nice as a another arrow in our quiver. Using it wisely is another can of worms.
- Animats 11y ago
  Browsers should have one built-in navigation transition. When you click on a link that leaves the page, something should happen immediately. It may take seconds for the new page to load, especially on cell networks. There's no immediate user feedback, resulting in multiple clicking, which restarts the page load. So on page exit, something visible should happen. Dim out the page, zoom it down to a tiny rectangle, swoop it off screen and replace it with a busy icon, or something. (Unfortunately, you can't implement this with a Firefox add-on, short of patching every link in the DOM, or I would.)
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > When you click on a link that leaves the page, something should happen immediately. On every browser I use, the UI changes immediately after clicking a new link. Pay attention the next time you click a link that's not in cache. Look for messages in the status bar (which is usually hidden, but typically becomes visible on resource load or when hovering over a link), changes of favicons to spinners in tabs, and the change of the reload graphic to a "stop" graphic. All of these UI changes are obvious to me. I get that some people are impatient, but these same impatient people likely know how to and are licensed to operate a motor vehicle. Motor vehicle operation is a task that requires constant attention and much finer attention to detail than is required to notice the current browser UI cues that indicate that a new page is on the way.
    - Animats 11y ago
      Here's Firefox, immediately after entering a site name into the URL window.[1] The only visible effects are that the tab name has changed to "Connecting", and the reload arrow has change to an "x". On Firefox Mobile, you don't get either of those, just a one pixel high progress bar at the top of the screen. It's worse on mobile, where things are slower and there are fewer auxiliary GUI items on screen. At this point, you've only partially left the page. Some clickable items on the page being exited will still work. It's not entirely clear exactly when event processing for the old page stops. [1] http://s3.postimg.org/53784icoj/afterlink.png http://s3.postimg.org/53784icoj/afterlink.png
warbastard 11y ago
I think he's wrong in his assumption that navigation transitions are being used just to emulate native apps. They are being used because they provide a usability benefit. A navigation transition can demonstrate a lot to a user about hierarchy and flow [1] [1] https://www.google.co.uk/design/spec/animation/meaningful-transitions.html https://www.google.co.uk/design/spec/animation/meaningful-tr...

by ixtli 11y ago

tutuca 11y ago

If you read further they link to a previous post that covers just that: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/05/web_vs_native_l.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/05/web_vs_nativ...

rtpg 11y ago

I'm sorry but how would making browsers the operating system cause the incompatability problems to reappear? I think this is massively ignoring the realities: - there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment - There's a standard for most things happening in a browser, which means that things look pixel-perfectly the same on a huge amount of browsers. Differences among current browsers are more among performance and experimental features So currently, if Google, Apple, and MSFT decided to jointly ban all native apps and only have a web browser on their smartphones, we would have a much better compatability situation, since so much functionality has been standardised on that end, and _actually respected_. The browser is basically what the JVM tried to be, a write once work anywhere solution that is pretty well sandboxed. It's miles better than pretty much every other cross-platform piece of tooling in existence.

pikzen 11y ago
>there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment Xamarin.Forms is the closest I can think of. Qt too, kind of. >The browser is basically what the JVM tried to be, a write once work anywhere solution that is pretty well sandboxed. It's miles better than pretty much every other cross-platform piece of tooling in existence. It's true, the browser succeeded as a working everywhere JVM equivalent. It also succeeded at reimplementing half of your OS features, being another massive source of security issues, being inefficient with resources (chrome memory usage lol), having piss poor perfomance and locking everything to Javascript. Compiling to Javascript is not a solution. A proper bytecode is. Which we may have with WebAssembly as soon as it's implemented and the standard respected by browser builders (which will probably be around 2040). Until Google decides to add a new WA feature that's incompatible with other browsers because that's what Google does. Let's not get started on the fact that HTML is a terrible language for UIs and that any Javascript based solution is not a solution at all (i.e. React is still crap, as is Meteor and javascript.framework.of.the.day.js). The web as an application delivery medium is a failed experiment, patched up on all sides and held together with 40MB of polyfills on every page. > if Google, Apple, and MSFT decided to jointly ban all native apps and only have a web browser on their smartphones, we would have a much better compatability situation, since so much functionality has been standardised on that end, and _actually respected_. 1. We've been hoping to get at least TWO browser vendors to fully collaborate for the last 20 years and it has not happened. It won't happen. 2. Performance will still be crap. 3. I'd rather not get locked to Google's piss poor record of updating the stock Android browser. In fact, I'd rather not get locked to Google's piss poor software at all, thank you very much. The same argument applies to Apple and Microsoft. Safari is awful, and so is IE/Edge.
- apalmer 11y ago
  I get where your coming from, and agree with a lot of what you say. BUT, Fundamentally... >The web as an application delivery medium is a failed experiment, patched up on all sides and held together with 40MB of polyfills on every page. Is just not a true statement. Or rather, the web sucks, but it is the only cross platform UI experiment that has 'worked' on any significant level.

digi_owl 11y ago

Back before the PC, didn't IBM and some other mainframe companies try to lease out terminals? This in that you could get a terminal on your home desk, that either via dedicated line or basic dialup would connect to a mainframe where you paid minute or something? In a sense the web browser, and SaaS, has become a reinvention of that...

zhte415 11y ago
Still do, big business. Any data dependent system. Reuters / Bloomberg / Datastream. Rented out terminals of a centralized system.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Ah yes, Bloomberg. Recently heard about those terminals in relation to someone using their service as something of a luxury Craigslist...
- immibis 11y ago
  With data dependent systems, I assume you pay for access to the data, not just for the ability to use a computer.
smacktoward 11y ago
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing A popular (for the time) example of this type of service was CompuServe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe). I had my first online experience connecting to CompuServe on my family's home PC, back in 1985.

dgreensp 11y ago

I don't associate "navigation transitions" with native apps. What native apps have navigation transitions? I think the iPod really popularized sliding screens and the like, and they spread to mobile. The feature for web browsers makes sense as progressive enhancement. Instead of using a "tool" (library), you just say "use this transition" and if the browser supports it, it does.

rco8786 11y ago

I think this is shortsighted. In 5-10 years browsers will be more Virtual Machine than Web Browser. You can almost argue that they already are. As browsers and phones get more and more performant, the idea of emulating native apps in the browser won't have the performance stigma attached to it. This same thing played out with Java et. al. It was dismissed for being non-performant when compared to C/C++(aka native code) because it ran inside a heavy VM but nowadays the performance is just fine for an enormous amount of applications because the virtual machines and hardware got faster.

VLM 11y ago
Probably will be more like a URL link aware VNC viewer. That has some interesting implications for the back end WRT emulation.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Oh, so a dumb terminal. Ok. It's 1980 again.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  If it can do everything the user wants then what is the issue? Just because it's been done before it's the wrong answer?
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    My reply was a bit ambiguous and snarky. I don't believe it's the wrong answer if it works. But people are commenting about moving the web forward to run apps in browsers and all and so there are parallels with what we did in the 80's. That's really what I was getting at. Nothing in computing is ever really new.
    - jmagoon 11y ago
      We're replacing a very nice custom SCO Unix backend developed at my work from 1980s onward (drops users into custom shell, multiple programs execute in the user context, leverages all the nice features of *nix) with a purchased desktop Windows ERP application and it makes me so sad. Literally we will move from having 1 to 2 admin who can manage 300 users, decades of automation, and totally instantaneous program execution (in C) with heavy user load on a single server to distributed, client based programs running on separate machines that all have to be patched, updated, troubleshot, etc.--(and the 5 person support team that has to go with it), communicating with a central program server and separate DB servers, etc.,etc., all because the console application is "too old looking".

wmeredith 11y ago

> But why do web developers want navigation transitions? In order to emulate native apps, of course. This is just a misunderstanding of good UI. Emulating native apps is NOT inherently "Good". There are terrible native apps and great ones. Navigation transitions would be nice as a another arrow in our quiver. Using it wisely is another can of worms.

Animats 11y ago
Browsers should have one built-in navigation transition. When you click on a link that leaves the page, something should happen immediately. It may take seconds for the new page to load, especially on cell networks. There's no immediate user feedback, resulting in multiple clicking, which restarts the page load. So on page exit, something visible should happen. Dim out the page, zoom it down to a tiny rectangle, swoop it off screen and replace it with a busy icon, or something. (Unfortunately, you can't implement this with a Firefox add-on, short of patching every link in the DOM, or I would.)
- simoncion 11y ago
  > When you click on a link that leaves the page, something should happen immediately. On every browser I use, the UI changes immediately after clicking a new link. Pay attention the next time you click a link that's not in cache. Look for messages in the status bar (which is usually hidden, but typically becomes visible on resource load or when hovering over a link), changes of favicons to spinners in tabs, and the change of the reload graphic to a "stop" graphic. All of these UI changes are obvious to me. I get that some people are impatient, but these same impatient people likely know how to and are licensed to operate a motor vehicle. Motor vehicle operation is a task that requires constant attention and much finer attention to detail than is required to notice the current browser UI cues that indicate that a new page is on the way.
  - Animats 11y ago
    Here's Firefox, immediately after entering a site name into the URL window.[1] The only visible effects are that the tab name has changed to "Connecting", and the reload arrow has change to an "x". On Firefox Mobile, you don't get either of those, just a one pixel high progress bar at the top of the screen. It's worse on mobile, where things are slower and there are fewer auxiliary GUI items on screen. At this point, you've only partially left the page. Some clickable items on the page being exited will still work. It's not entirely clear exactly when event processing for the old page stops. [1] http://s3.postimg.org/53784icoj/afterlink.png http://s3.postimg.org/53784icoj/afterlink.png

warbastard 11y ago

I think he's wrong in his assumption that navigation transitions are being used just to emulate native apps. They are being used because they provide a usability benefit. A navigation transition can demonstrate a lot to a user about hierarchy and flow [1] [1] https://www.google.co.uk/design/spec/animation/meaningful-transitions.html https://www.google.co.uk/design/spec/animation/meaningful-tr...