We live in a timeline where desktop apps all run in a browser, whereas mobile websites are all their own apps.
For now at least, PWAs work on Android and I believe many apps already use electron or something similar under the hood
It seems every new shiny technology today tries its darndest to short-circuit 40+ years of advances in OS virtual memory design. Between Electron and Docker, the entire idea of loading an image into memory once and sharing its pages among hundreds of processes is basically dead. But at least there’s lower support burden!!!1111
World Wide Web was not intended to be an app framework.
What else works across as many platforms and screen sizes as well as the combination of HTML/CSS/JS?
Most attempts to build that just lead to a worse version of it.
I’ll be the first to admit it’s bloated to all hell after 25 years of people stacking crap on top of more crap, and it’s perilously close to being completely controlled by Google, but it is what it is.
Maybe I do not specify clearly what I mean.
Why to order taxi, access bank, register a domain name do we have to have apps on all platforms and then to fix this problem we bloat the web by creating webapps. Why not just plain simple HTML website beautified with CSS instead?
Real cross-platform apps are those written in, for example QT. Then came Android and iOS forcing everyone to use their toolkits so we started to abuse poor web.
Well I’m in agreement there.
The only reason they want everything as an app is so they can push notifications and do any tracking they can legally get away with (and some they can’t but who’s gonna know?)
Dominos have locked all their deals that actually make a pizza a normal price that humans would willingly pay for a pizza behind their app. There’s no reason for them to do this. Surely their business model is selling pizza? So now I go to a little family run pizza shop, pay less and get decent pizza.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way for all these electron apps to share the same runtime so people don’t have to bundle it with their applications.
You know, I bet if the applications without the runtime are small enough, you could probably stream them directly from the internet without even downloading anything up front!
I guess that shared runtime would need some way to browse the applications…
^(vscode gets a pass)
That’s why I got 32GB ram when I upgrade my PC. I don’t give a fuck to how many ram they use now.
This is the same coping mechanism as “just build another 4 lane highway. That should solve the traffic issues”. You are just shifting the problem.
I’m not shifting the problem if I have actually paid the money to build the 4 lane highway.
The point is that building the 4 lane highway is a poor solution
I don’t know much about car traffics but I don’t see how adding more RAM to solve the problem of not having enough RAM is a poor solution
The idea is that increasing road capacity will increase demand and basically make traffic as bas again and similarly “just add more ram”-ing will just lead to developers using less memory efficient practices leading the same situation down the line.
Which is a flaw logic as it implies
- The RAM capacity of any PC is a publicly available information like the road capacity; AND
- Electron app developers are checking info of 1. (if it’s somehow available) to decide how they optimize their app. Which doesn’t seems reasonable as electron apps are not games and thus not expected to use 100% RAM.
Of course the average amount of ram in computers isn’t some secret. What are you on about? It’s only thanks to the fact that we have gigabytes of ram these days that inefficient practices are possible. If developers didn’t know that, they would have no idea that was possible. How on earth do you think developers would ever optimise software and determine their performance requirements if specs were unknown? I’m not saying they’re snooping on YOU individually (although there’s a ton of telemetry these days everywhere and ram is probably a common statistic collected by software - Steam’s hardware survey is public and shows millions of computer’s specs. Any software you use knows your ram capacity - it’s not secret. The ram capacity of newly sold systems is public is obviously shown on spec sheets)…
The point is that you’re not fixing the problem, you’re just masking it (and one could even argue enabling it).
The same way adding another 4 lane highway doesn’t fix traffic long term (increasing highway throughput leads to more people leads to more cars leads to congestion all over again) simply adding more RAM is only a temporary solution.
Developers use the excuse of people having access to more RAM as justification to produce more and more bloated software. In 5 years you’ll likely struggle even with 32GiB, because everything uses more.
That’s not sustainable, and it’s not necessary.The same way adding another 4 lane highway doesn’t fix traffic long term (increasing highway throughput leads to more people leads to more cars leads to congestion all over again) simply adding more RAM is only a temporary solution.
How is adding more RAM a temporary solution? It would lead more workload to the CPU… which is good?
- People have enough RAM.
- Developers see people getting more RAM.
- Developers allow their software to use more RAM (either by doing more cool stuff or optimizing less stuff).
- People have little RAM.
- People buy more RAM.
- goto 1;
This also applies to CPU and GPU.
Electron is awesome, badly coded apps just suck. Look at Voyager for Lemmy, it’s great and it’s just a web app.
No, it’s not nice. Looks good only on Windows where everything have unmaching look anyway.
Lmao, need more title bars to match macOS’ 90s aesthetic?
