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0 pointsmindcrime9y ago0 comments

Because ...?

Not the poster you're replying to, but I'll share my thoughts:

1. Trying to make the browser ideal for both browsing content, and rendering rich application UIs bloats the browser.

2. Time spent trying to make the browser a poor imitation of an X server is time that could go into making the browser better at, ya know, browsing. FSM only knows, Firefox could use a LOT more developer time spent on improving performance and reducing the memory footprint. (Yeah, I know, sometimes that those goals overlap. But not always, which is the point)

3. For all the talk about how X11 remoting doesn't work over the Internet, I've done it and it worked just fine. YMMV, but it certainly can work just fine in at least some situations.

4. Trying to create a rich experience in the browser inevitably leads to conflicts that don't exist in a desktop app. For example, typically the F1 key is the "Help" key. So if I'm sitting in a web application, and I hit F1, what happens? Do I get help for my application, or for the web browser? Likewise, can my app easily use the F11 key? No. And look at the UI inconsistency between web "apps". There's none. With desktop apps, most apps adhered (mostly) to one of a relatively small set of standards... CUA, or whatever. With web apps, the experience is all over the damn place.

I'm sure there are other good reasons, but those jump out to me.

0 comments

macspoofing9y ago

>Trying to make the browser ideal for both browsing content, and rendering rich application UIs bloats the browser.

Maybe, maybe not - depends on how you define bloat. Modern operating systems, mobile and desktop, are magnitudes larger than their counterparts from years ago, are they bloated because they are bigger?

Having a more feature-rich browser doesn't make a browser 'bloated' - it makes it more feature-rich.

>Firefox could use a LOT more developer time spent on improving performance and reducing the memory footprint.

That's already happening, except browser performance is now focused on improving rendering engines and js engines to enable rich applications, because every modern browser is already very good at rendering 'simple', non-RIA, pages.

>For example, typically the F1 key is the "Help" key. So

Woah woah. Giving web applications capabilities that match those of native desktop applications, doesn't mean mimicking every desktop convention. The Web doesn't work with function keys, that's a convention that arose largely from platform limitations - so F1 doesn't mean 'Help' in the Web, just like F1 doesn't mean help in your CLI either. What's wrong with that?

>For all the talk about how X11 remoting doesn't work over the Internet

Anything can work - the problem is that there is no universal platform accessible to consumers to enable X11 streaming. On the other hand, almost every computing device these days provides an HTML/CSS/JS rendering engine. That's why developers want to build on top of the web-stack. So through a quirk of history that's what we ended up with - in an alternate universe, maybe the standard for rich web applications are Java Applets, or ActiveX, or X11, or SSH, or whatever. That's not the world we live in.

>With web apps, the experience is all over the damn place.

Sure, and you can go crazy, but there are conventions. For example, the way links look and behave is intuitive. I've built desktop and web applications, and there is a core 'feel' that all web-applications share because the browser takes care of so much of the behaviour and provides the base widgets and the framework. Things like the way links look, that they are underlined when you hover over them and your cursor changes, that you can right-click on a link and open in a new window/tab, how cut-and-paste and text-highlight is handled, drag-and-drop, (browser) zoom, how fullscreen works. Yes, any given page can override some of those of behaviors, but then again, so can a 'native' app.

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