It seems like industry is perpetually locked in a death-spiral of creating the most "native-like" meta-platform that tries to mimic whatever proprietary platform is currently big. Eventually, another proprietary platform emerges and captures mindshare, and the nerds get angry at the proprietary-ness and start a new meta-platform emerges with the same promises of "eventually it will great." Due to idealism and politics, the meta-platform attracts a huge amount of smart devs who ultimately are trying to replicate something that people already have.
I'm sorry to sound grumpy, it just seems like everything runs in circles and nobody seems to care or notice. Maybe tech is much better when it's applied to tough domains.
It is circular, but that's actually a good thing. It just means that large open platforms (like the web) eventually catch up to proprietary systems.
It's a democratizing force. Something that two years ago took an experienced team of professional developers may today take a single novice developer reading a simple tutorial.
Both in the web and in native there will be people pushing the limits of what's possible, but what's exciting is when fringe technologies hit the mainstream and become available for everyone. IMHO, at least (author of the post here).
I just watched a presentation on "Making Web Apps Appy"and it points out some things that the web is best at doing and some things that apps do better. I get a sense that Google is adding the things users like about apps to the web while preserving what makes it better than apps and not just copying the app experience whole to the web.
The web is still here and it's still used for things apps aren't. It still does things better than apps. There is still a industry built on it. But it can be better and apps have shown some of the ways how so naturally browser vendors are taking cues from it.
> We all know that animating transform and opacity goes smoothly, and everything else goes terribly. Google thinks that's a bummer and wants to fix it. However, they warn that the rendering changes required are so fundamental that it may be difficult for other vendors to match. Expect that to play out over a few years.
I'd be interested to know what those changes are. From what I can tell, you want off-main-thread layout because a lot of these properties require layout. But Google rejected off-main-thread layout as "not helpful". Perhaps they're referring to display lists ("Blueprints"), which can indeed be helpful, but Gecko already has them… (Granted, display list building in Gecko is not incremental yet, but that does not require "fundamental" rearchitecting.)
Web app distribution and discoverability are things not addressed in the current web app manifest standard. Mozilla has a API that allows sites to trigger an install with using a navigator.Apps.install() function but I believe browser vendors are concerned about users being bugged by sites that would missuse it. Many websites would ask to be installed even content only sites.
I believe Google wants to move from the curated app store model with reviews and ratings to a search results model algorithmically ranked apps. So making a web apps store or adding web apps to the play store doesn't work with their future plans.
This article is just terrible. Their argument is that Google is not a perfect judge of correct information and does not instantly return all relevant facts.
No shit. In fact despite the negative tone of the article, when I googled "who is ariana grande?", their explicit question, Google returns a Knowledge Graph box from IMDB. A relatively authoritative source, telling me precisely the information I would have expected.
It seems like industry is perpetually locked in a death-spiral of creating the most "native-like" meta-platform that tries to mimic whatever proprietary platform is currently big. Eventually, another proprietary platform emerges and captures mindshare, and the nerds get angry at the proprietary-ness and start a new meta-platform emerges with the same promises of "eventually it will great." Due to idealism and politics, the meta-platform attracts a huge amount of smart devs who ultimately are trying to replicate something that people already have.
I'm sorry to sound grumpy, it just seems like everything runs in circles and nobody seems to care or notice. Maybe tech is much better when it's applied to tough domains.