Why do we create modern desktop GUI apps using HTML/CSS/JavaScript? (2022)
&gt;the performance of a well written UI in a modern browser out-performs a native desktop application in every category of sped, usability and presentation for most usual use cases<p>This guy needs to come up with a list of those well written UIs, because every single one I know is noticeably worse than native apps. I work with a Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores)&#x2F;64GB RAM, and the slack application (which I only use because of work) lags for common UI operations like switching channels. This is an application that consists in...displaying some lines of text with small icon images, plus the occasional youtube thumbnail. A 27$ billion company can&#x27;t apparently make an electron app that displays text performant.<p>I use two bank apps in my phone. Both use web UIs underneath. Both are incredibly slow. I have also been unable to complete some operation in both of them at some point because I hit UI bugs and wasn&#x27;t able to continue - something moved and I wasn&#x27;t able to move or tap into whatever allowed me to continue. Given that apps are the only way I interact with banks these days, I&#x27;m seriously considering searching for a bank that does have a native app. I would love to be the client of a company that cares more about customers than about having more than one codebase.<p>Web browsers aren&#x27;t even good at doing web applications. And unfortunately, web makers seem to have (IMO) lost interest in addressing the core problems of browsers. Instead they focus in wasm (because reinventing Java is somehow revolutionary), adding even more HTML5 popups, and not wondering why web pages bother users with weekly newsletters JS popups (that&#x27;s what RSS was invented for, but apparently we should forget about it).<p>Why do we create modern Desktop GUIs using web technologies? Apart from the benefit of a single codebase, it&#x27;s largely because widget based UIs aren&#x27;t as good at designing complex layouts as web browsers are. That&#x27;s the strong point of browsers (also, people decided at some point that having an unified style for all UIs that you use is boring).<p>A lot of people keep treating web browsers as some kind of cool, new technology. These people need to wake up. Web browsers are actually a bloated, horrible dinosaur that sucks in too many ways and we only use because there is nothing better (someone described it once as the MS-DOS of our days). And browser makers are fighting hard to bloat it even more to cover corner cases that only a minority cares about, while having normal, fast UIs remains a privilege that is only affordable by Silicon Valley companies. I really hope at some point we can stop using HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;Javascript not just for desktop apps, but also for &quot;remote&quot; web apps.