- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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World Wide Web was not intended to be an app framework.
Internet was not intended to be worldwide, it was for military purposes. Still, we all evolve.
Yet Internet just scaled up to handle worldwide traffic, while WWW evolved into mess noone is able to implement anymore.
Sorry, what’s the issue with the WWW mess? I don’t get it.
Inspect any major website, you’ll see boilerplate of
<div><div><div><div>and unreadable pile of JavaScript programs your browser need to run to build the website. Sites should be done in a way that is still readable after you disable one element (for example disable CSS function, scripts or HTML specific tag).Internet is modular, based on stacked protocols. Want to fit Tor between TCP and HTTP? No problem. Web is also like that, build of semi-independent formats, in theory. But in practice devs are using frameworks that assume Chrome, Firefox and Safari are and would ever be the only things existing. Now if you want to develop new browser you not only need to display HTML and add other things later. You need to get all specifications of all standards working right away or sites would spectacularly break.</div></div></div></div>
It’s a bit of a shame that HTML went from describing documents to describing UIs. I do miss the days of simple websites, although I’m not old enough to remember the old old internet.
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.
We live in a timeline where desktop apps all run in a browser, whereas mobile websites are all their own apps.
I HATE ELECTRON I HATE ELECTRON I HATE ELEC
Electron? More like cringetron
Tja in a world where every OS has its own stupid little UI system, language and IDE…
What does Tja mean?
Dutch people use it (although I doubt it’s an official word), meaning something like “that’s what you get” or “oh well”.
Also used in German
no idea if this is right or not, but lol
Oh of COURSE, how could I be so stupid
That is hilarious though, I got some German friends I need to ask about this
It is also widely used to express something like “I told you so” or “I already warned you that this will happen. You did this to yourself.” in a single word.
E.g. “Did you hear about my anti-vaxx aunt Hildegard? She died of Covid last month.”
“Tja.”
Ach ja
Well, people tend to pick the easiest way to achieve an objective, even though the solution is not simple nor optimised.
Electron is awesome, badly coded apps just suck. Look at Voyager for Lemmy, it’s great and it’s just a web app.
Electron apps are nice in some ways, but use a ton of memory
I usually don’t mind electron apps too much, but I do prefer native apps
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?
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.
I got 32 on my desktop so I’m fine there, but my laptop explodes if I try to run the same amount of stuff with 8GB ram
*dies in 4GB RAM*
Have you considered downloading more ram?
Yeah, but RAM is a bit costly, so saving up for it.
My friend… have you heard of our lord and savior downloadmoreram.com? You can DOWNLOAD more ram FOR FREE!
Hmm, what a great idea that totally doesn’t look like a scam!
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.
Folks in this thread complaining about Electron I think miss the point. It is a trade-off. It is designed to allow engineers who have a web dev skillset to write desktop apps. For those like me who want to write the occasional hobby app - it’s great. It’s also great for orgs to be able to have cross functional teams. Just like React Native allows this for the mobile world. This could be because they’re small and can’t afford specialist native engineers for each platform they want to support - or it could be that they want to spend their money in other areas and happy to trade off app performance. If it was as lean or as performant as native apps there would be a lot of people in this thread looking for work.
It’s not terrible, electron is good for stuff like what you discuss
I just like native apps better haha
Native apps have the potential to be better than electron apps for sure. I get that.
This is a surface level thing though - the question is: would THIS app, written by THAT organisation be better if it was native? Unlikely because they don’t have the skillset for it…otherwise it would have been a native app. Its also likely that less apps would even exist because the barrier to entry is higher without electron and similar.
But this is just a meme and I’m taking this way too seriously!
