It's really nuts how much RAM and CPU have been squandered. In, 1990, I worked on a networked graphical browser for nuclear plants. Sun workstations had 32 mb memory. We had a requirement that the infographic screens paint in less that 2 seconds. Was a challenge but doable. Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds.
Yes, the web was a mistake; as a distributed document reading platform it's a decent first attempt, but as an application platform it is miserable. I'm working on a colleague's vibe-coded app right now and it's just piles and piles of code to do something fairly simple; long builds and hundreds of dependencies... most of which are because HTML is shitty, doesn't have the GUI controls that people need built in, and all of it has to be worked around as a patch after the fact. Even doing something as simple as a sortable-and-filterable table requires thousands of lines of JS when it should've just been a few extra attributes on an HTML6 <table> by now.
Back in the day with PHP things were much more understandable, it's somehow gotten objectively worse. And now, most desktop apps are their own contained browser. Somehow worse than Windows 98 .hta apps, too; where at least the system browser served a local app up, now we have ten copies of Electron running, bringing my relatively new Macbook to a crawl. Everything sucks and is way less fun than it used to be.
We have many, many examples of GUI toolkits that are extremely fast and lightweight. Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?
It's not "the web" or HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. That's all instant in vanilla form. Any media in today's quality will of course take time to download but, once cached, is also instant. None of the UX "requires" the crap that makes it slow, certainly not thousands of lines to make a table sortable and filterable. I could do that in IE6 without breaking a sweat. It's way easier, and faster, now. It's just people being lazy in how they do it, Apparetnly now just accepting whatever claude gave them as "best in show".
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?
Not going to happen until gui frameworks are as comfortable and easy to set up and use as html. Entry barrier and ergonomics are among the biggest deciding factors of winning technologies.
There are cross platform concerns as well. If the option is to build 3-4 separate apps in different languages and with different UI toolkits to support all the major devices and operating systems, or use the web and be 80% there in terms of basic functionality, and also have better branding, I think the choice is not surprising.
In line with "the web was a mistake" I think the idea that you can create cross platform software is an equally big mistake.
You can do the core functionality of your product as cross platform, to some extend, but once you hit the interaction with the OS and especially the UI libraries of the OS, I think you'd get better software if you just accept that you'll need to write multiple application.
We see this on mobile, there's just two target platform really, yet companies don't even want to do that.
The choice isn't surprising, in a world where companies are more concerned with saving and branding, compared to creating good products.
>You can do the core functionality of your product as cross platform, to some extend, but once you hit the interaction with the OS and especially the UI libraries of the OS, I think you'd get better software if you just accept that you'll need to write multiple application.
Or you can use a VM, which is essentially what a modern browser is anyway. I wrote and maintained a Java app for many years with seamless cross platform development. The browser is the right architecture. It's the implementation that's painful, mostly for historical reasons.
But using a browser (or a VM) buys into the fallacy that your customers across different platforms (Windows, Mac, etc) want the same product. They’re already distinguished by choosing a different platform! They have different aesthetics, different usability expectations, different priorities around accessibility and discover ability. You can produce an application (or web app) that is mediocre for all of them, but to provide a good product requires taking advantage of these distinctions — a good application will be different for different platforms, whether or not the toolkit is different.
I've only done one platform gui work (python) but I'd guess this is stuff that is ripe for transpiling since a lot of gui code is just reusing the same boilerplate everyone is using to get the same ui patters everyone is using. Like if I make something in tkinter seems like it should be pretty straightforward to write a tool that can translate all my function calls as I've structured them into a chunk of Swift that would draw the same size window same buttons etc.
We get into transpiling and we essentially start to rebuild yet another cross platform framework. Starts with "read this filetype and turn it into this layout" and it ends up with "we'll make sure this can deploy on X,Y,Z,W..."
It'd be nice if companies could just play nice and agree on a standard interface. That's the one good thing the web managed to do. It's just stuck to what's ultimately 3 decades of tech debt from a prototype document reader made in a few weeks.
>It'd be nice if companies could just play nice and agree on a standard interface
They basically do though. Every cross platform native ported app I've used the GUI is the same layout. Well, except on macos the menu ribbon is on the topbar and windows it has its own ribbon layer in the application window. But that is it. All these frameworks already have feature parity with another. It is expected that they have these same functions and ui paradigms. Here's your button function. Here is where you specify window dimensions. This function opens a file browser. This one takes in user input to the textbox. I mean it is all pretty standardized and limited what you can expect to do in ui already.
There is a lot of stuff you can get done with the standard library alone of various languages that play nice on all major platforms. People tend to reach for whatever stack of dependencies is popular at the time, however.
Cross platform GUI libraries suck. Ever used a GTK app under Windows? It looks terrible, renders terrible, doesn't support HiDPI. Qt Widgets still have weird bugs when you connect or disconnect displays it rerenders UIs twice the size. None of those kinds of bugs exist for apps written in Microsoft's UI frameworks and browsers.
The problem with cross platform UI is that it is antithetical to the purpose of an OS-native UI in its reason of existence. Cross platform tries to unify the UX while native UI tries to differentiate the UX. Native UI wants unique incompatible behavior.
So the cross platform UI frameworks that try to use the actual OS components always end up with terrible visual bugs due to unifying things that don't want to be unified. Or worse many "cross platform" UI frameworks try to mimic the its developer's favorite OS. I have seen way too many Android apps that has "cross platform" frameworks that draw iOS UI elements.
The best way to do cross platform applications with a GUI (I specifically avoid cross platform UI) is defining a yet another platform above a very basic common layer. This is what Web had done. What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web and this is why Electron works so well for applications deployed in multiple OSes.
I have created and used them. They didn't look terrible on windows.
>What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web..
I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too..
I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good...
There's loads of funding. But the ones funding Qt and GTK aren't parties interested in things like cohesion or design standards. They just needed a way to deliver their product to the user in a faster way than maintaining 2-3 OS platform apps. Wanting that shipping velocity by its nature sacrifices the above elements.
The remnants of the dotcom era for web definitely helped shape it in a more design contentious way, in comparison. Those standards are created and pushed a few layers above that in which cross platform UI's work in.
Here is Bleachbit, a GTK3-based disk cleanup utility. It is a blurry mess and GTK3 Window headers are completely out of style and behavior with Windows.
> I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too..
The problem is they half-ass it. Qt only does it with QML. Qt Widgets is half-half and it is a mess.
Overall these do not invalidate my point though. If you want a truly cross-platform application GUI, you need to rewrite the GUI for each OS. Or you give up and write one GUI that's running on its own platform.
> I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good...
Indeed, Google employs some of the smartest software developers and ones with really niche skills like Behdad Esfahbod who created the best or the second best font rendering library out there. However, Qt has a company behind (a very very incompetent one, not just the library but operating a business). I have seen many commercial libraries too, they are all various shades of terrible.
Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps, but those GUIs were rather static and limited by today's standards. People have now gotten used to responsive GUIs that resize to any window size, easy dynamic hiding of controls, and dynamic lists in any part of the GUI; you won't get them to come back to a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`.
> Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps
Yes, they were comfortable and easy to set up (and use), particularly when compared to web development.
> a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`
This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time, _especially_ when it started replacing RAD tools like VB and Delphi. In fact, it still looks like this in many ways, except now you have a JSX property and React state for disabling the button, and a mess of complex tooling, setup and node modules just to get to that base level.
The web won not because of programmer convenience, but because it offered ease of distribution. Turns out everything else was secondary.
> This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time
React is over a decade old, and as far as I remember, desktop apps using embedded browsers (Electron) started becoming dominant after it came out.
The ease-of-distribution advantage is huge, but web technologies are big outside the Web too, where it doesn't apply.
(Besides my main point, idiomatic web UIs don't implement resize handlers for positioning each element manually, but instead use CSS to declaratively create layouts. Modern GUI libraries with visual builders can also do this, but it was decidedly not the norm in the 90s.
Also, modern dynamic GUIs generally don't use a static layout with disabled parts, but hide or add parts outright. That kind of dynamicity is hard to even conceptualise with a GUI builder.)
Microsoft invented AJAX when building Outlook for the web back in 2000. GMail was released in 2003 and Google Docs in 2006. Around this time, even enterprise giants like SAP started offering web UIs. This is the shift from RAD to web I'm talking about.
The current idiomatic way of doing web layouts was, back then, almost entirely theoretical. The reality was a cross-browser hell filled with onResize listeners, in turn calling code filled with browser-specific if statements. Entire JavaScript libraries were devoted to correctly identifying browsers in order for developers to take appropriate measures when writing UI code. Separate machines specifically devoted to running old versions of Internet Explorer had to be used during testing and development, in order to ensure end user compatibility.
In short: The web was not in any way, shape or form more convenient for developers than the RAD tools it replaced. But it was instant access multi-platform distribution which readily allowed for Cloud/SaaS subscription models.
Electron happened more as an afterthought, when the ease of distribution had already made web UIs, and hence web UI developers, hegemonic. Heck, even MS Office for the web predates React, Electron, and something as arcane as Internet Explorer 9.
Things have gotten much better, but we're still having to reinvent things that just existed natively in VB6 (DataGrid, anyone?) - and at the cost of increasingly complex toolchains and dependencies.
Pretty much any non-web GUI framework I tried so far has either been terrible to set up, or terrible to deploy. Or both. Electron is stupidly simple.
ImGUI is the single exception that has been simple to set up, trivial to deploy (there is nothing to deploy, including it is all that's needed), and nice to use.
Specifically for panning and zooming, doesn't the OS translate those inputs to mouse events, like Windows does by default?
Otherwise it is simply a matter of performing this translation at the backend level.
> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?
Great. How do you get all the hardware and OS vendors to deploy it for free and without applying their own "vetting" or inserting themselves into the billing?
I wouldn't say that. The web had done way more good than harm overall. What I would say is that embedding the internet (and its tracking and spyware and dark patterns that have gain prominence) into every single application that we use is what is at fault.
The web browser that we built in 1990 was all on-premise obviously. And it had a very different architecture than HTTP. There were two processes. One used TCP/IP to mirror the plant computers model into memory on the workstation. The other painted the infographics and handled the user navigating to different screens. The two processes used shared memory to communicate. It was my first job out of university.
The Internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the surveillance we endure for those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries.
Back in PHP days you had an incentive to care about performance, because it's your servers that are overloaded. With frontend there's no such issue, because it's not your hardware that is being loaded
Was doing sortable-and-filterable tables in the browser without a server round-trip 20 years ago using XML/XSLT and not thousands of lines of JS but something on the order of dozens.
These feel like all the things a proper "Web 3.0" should have solved. We have decades of lessons learned that we could apply with a soft reboot to how we envision the web.
Instead it's just piling on a dozen layers of dependencies. Webassembly feels like the only real glimmer of what the "next generation" could have been like.
When I use my work PC under Win 11, I endlessly notic all the lag on basically everything. Click and email in outlook at it takes 3 seconds to draw in... thats a good 12 billion cycles on a single core to do that. Multiply that by hundreds/thousands of events across all events on the system and I wonder how many trillions of cycles are wasted on bloat everyday.
My 17 year old core 2 duo should not feel faster on a lean linux distro than modern hardware and yet it does. Wild to see and somewhat depressing.
I see old videos (Computer chronicles a good example) of what could be done on a 486 for instance. While you can see the difference in overall experience, it isnt that extreme of a difference, the 486 being released 37 years ago...
