I’m hoping that great AI means we get back to native apps and leave the web house of cards behind.

Fuck no. Native apps are _invariably_ worse than well-designed webapps: no tabs, no bookmarks, no copy/paste, deep links are usually broken, no ability to open multiple apps side-by-side.

I don't think I know even a single exception outside the hardware-heavy games or AR/VR.

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JoshTriplett 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm hoping that more native apps get rewritten as web apps so they can stay in a browser sandbox where they belong. "Fortunately", we'll probably both get all the slop we "want".

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criddell an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You make a good point - the sandbox of the browser is a genuine improvement. It's crazy to think that on some desktop OS's if you download and run a weather app, it probably has access to all the files and peripherals you do (camera, microphone, etc...). Apple is doing good work on this front with macOS as are Linux devs with Flatpak. Mobile operating systems do a good job of isolating apps too.

Windows though... seems to be stuck in the 90's.

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wry_xy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I find it interesting that HN's love of performance seems to overpower their love of security. Especially since nearly everyone here has better hardware than average people.

I do not enjoy running random strangers' Rust on my machine unless it's sitting in a VM and probably also a container, at which point the performance benefit is gone anyways.

I recently moved all of the desktop apps I reasonably could to browser tabs and have been quite happy with it.

Oh and don't forget how easily you can modify the source. With a simple user script or extension I can modify your website to behave exactly how I want it to without recompiling.

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Karrot_Kream 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's largely because when Electron first came out the browser app platform (the API availability, performance, etc) was still quite thin and Electron was quite slow. HN just got stuck in this echo that web browsers are very inefficient and have no benefits while native apps are so much better. Java had the same echo for a long time on nerd forums because the JVM was a lot slower than native compiled apps for the first few years of its development.

In practice since then, browser-based apps ended up eating a lot of the demand for native apps and the web browser as a platform ended up displacing a lot of native apps, but the echo has stayed around here with little grounding. As such the distribution, security, and performance posture for browser and mobile apps has become a lot better while native app toolkits have lagged behind.

There's certainly a possibility that agentic development will make native development "cheap" again and encourage a lot more of it. But the web platform's security posture is much more well fleshed out at this point so I'm not sure.

	▲	JoshTriplett 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Electron also papered over the problem that browsers weren't evergreen, so if you ran in the user's browser, you might not have support for current web APIs you want to depend on. Most browsers are evergreen and updated frequently now, to the point that that no longer seems like an issue.