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Discussion on: Does your website really need to be larger than Windows 95?

 
tux0r profile image
tux0r

I need to make money (...) with programming

Apple makes money with programming, not having one single "web application" that would be worth a cent.

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sudiukil profile image
Quentin Sonrel

Apple is Apple, you are not, I am not, and no one else is, what applies to them cannot be generalized.

You are talking about a company that makes money by having it's own ecosystem and it's own marketing target. They don't sell products, they sell a brand. Their phones are not the best (none are) yet they sell, because they have their customers ready to buy just for the brand. The same goes for their software, may it be desktop or not. They could just switch everything to the cloud tomorrow, they'd still make a shitload of money because their customers will remain.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

Apple is Apple, you are not, I am not, and no one else is

No one else can make money with software that does not run in your web browser? Are you serious?

Even some of my (free) desktop software - not even actively marketed by me - generates donations because people want it. What am I doing wrong?

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sudiukil profile image
Quentin Sonrel • Edited

I'm not saying no one else can, I'm saying Apple is an irrelevant example because of their very specific way of doing things.

Of course you can make money by developing something that runs outside a web browser, I'm just saying this has nothing to do with the whole JS topic.

JS is needed for some things and desktop apps are not always an alternative, that was the original debate.

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zhu48 profile image
Zuodian Hu

As long as we're here, non-browser apps generally reach a smaller audience since there's a slightly higher barrier to entry. The user has to go and install it. Is that a problem for a well-targeted application? Probably not, depending on the space it's trying to get users in. Is that a problem if you're trying to reach a broad audience? Yes. I know plenty of people who resist downloading and installing an application as long as they can. Download one browser, access millions of websites and associated content! Now that is a user experience that just feels good.

Making a desktop application that has the same reach as a web app seems insanely impossible. You write a webapp, it work on Windows, all Linux distributions that run a desktop and Firefox or Chromium, iOS, OSX, Android, and Chromebook. You write a desktop application, just making sure your application is portable to all of those operating systems takes careful design. Sure, you may not care about every single one of those OSs, but then you probably aren't trying to reach that broad of an audience in the first place and writing a desktop application was a design decision you made. People who are trying to reach that broad of an audience made the design decision to write a webapp. Every webapp developer who's commented on this post says they don't like JS, but they still use it. You can bet a great sum of money that they're not just using JS to be masochistic.

Another benefit of the webapp frontend is the uniformity of the user experience. Slack is the same if I use the desktop wrapper, a web browser, the Android app, or the iOS app. To me as a user, that's a beautiful thing! You can use other means of achieving that cross-platform uniformity, but only if you can afford to target a smaller user base.

Webapps and JS have carved out a big niche on the modern Internet, and it will take a lot of effort to dig JS out.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

You write a webapp, it work on Windows, all Linux distributions that run a desktop and Firefox or Chromium, iOS, OSX, Android, and Chromebook. You write a desktop application, just making sure your application is portable to all of those operating systems takes careful design.

It had become much harder to target all major web browsers (with all major JavaScript versions...) than to target all major operating systems. JavaScript can break tomorrow. The Windows API probably won't.

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zhu48 profile image
Zuodian Hu

Even with the disparity in abstraction level between desktop and mobile operating system development environments, making cross-learning and cross-development more difficult? Your first step in trying to generically cross all of those operating systems is surely to make a uniform abstraction layer. But that's what the web app platform is. To supercede the web app platform, you have to do it better and market it to developers really well. Maybe HTML5 is the answer, I don't know, I write embedded code for the most part. But I sure don't expect developers to abandon all the really nice JS frameworks in 5 years.

Also, even if what you say is taken for granted, that doesn't address how much more difficult the Windows API is to learn than JS.

Anyways, what I'm saying is, give us an open source framework better than Qt, and stop telling current JS developers what they already know.

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bgadrian profile image
Adrian B.G.

Even QT and JavaFX are "polluted" by CSS. Like JS, CSS is not the perfect language but is the best we have for now for client apps.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

Even with the disparity in abstraction level between desktop and mobile operating system development environments, making cross-learning and cross-development more difficult?

With the advent of FireMonkey (Delphi for Android/iOS) and Xamarin (.NET for Android/iOS), this can safely be considered a solved problem.

that doesn't address how much more difficult the Windows API is to learn than JS.

The Windows API was an example. Even if you use wxWidgets or (my favorite GUI framework) IUP, you can be sure that there will be no major OS upgrade in the next two weeks that breaks everything. This can not be said about Chrome's and Firefox's JavaScript interpreters.

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zhu48 profile image
Zuodian Hu

Okay, well then evangelize your favorite cross platform GUI framework instead of lecturing JS devos about JS.

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qm3ster profile image
Mihail Malo

Lmao when have Chrome's or Firefox's JavaScript interpreters ever broken a single thing?

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

"Lmao" (please try to keep your questions at least relatively civil, "lmao" looks dumb and won't make you win this argument), you are aware that both V8 and SpiderMonkey (or whatever is the current name of that thing) are constantly updated and extended with non-standard "ECMAScript" features? You are aware that every single Chrome update has - so far - broken one or more websites?

Feel free to use your favorite search engine instead of lmao'ing at me.

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qm3ster profile image
Mihail Malo

I didn't realize I'm in any sort of argument right now
I was just requesting specifics, of which I received none so far.

Can you give me an example of serious breakage from a Chrome or FF update in recent history?

I googled the last 4 versions of chrome before I got bored and got one bug in timezones that was fixed within that same version.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

I didn't realize I'm in any sort of argument right now

Neither was I before you started to laugh at me. That was not nice.

Can you give me an example of serious breakage from a Chrome or FF update in recent history?

This one?

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qm3ster profile image
Mihail Malo

Synchronous AJAX request

tho