As Mobile Roars Ahead, the Web Is Dying

http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/as-mobile-roars-ahead-its-time-to-finally-admit-the-world-wide-web-is-dying/

by prostoalex • 12 years ago

15 7 12 years ago

slacka• 12 years ago

For my job I'm often dealing with pdf datasheets, so yesterday when Opera claimed on HN that web technologies were good enough, I fired up FF and put it to the test.

"Web is rapidly losing users as it fails to adapt to disruption from mobile apps and continues to perform poorly – despite incredible optimization efforts – due to a bloated software architecture built of hacks on top of hacks."

Summed up my experience of PDF.js vs native code perfectly. When trying to do real work with it, I could handle additional 10 second load times, but the 2-5 second delays ever time I scrolled would drive me crazy. When today's machines can't render a simple text document smoothly, something is seriously wrong with the underlying technology.

DigitalSea2• 12 years ago

Classic Techcrunch book of sensationalism 101 at its finest. The title says the web is dying but then starts comparing HTML/Javascript web applications to native ones forgoing the fact that any app (Facebook for example) is interfacing with a web-based API behind the scenes. A more appropriate title would have been, "As Native Mobile Applications Roar Ahead, Web Based Applications are Dying" but even then it's still sensationalism, because the article provides little source or fact to back this claim up.

The only claim the article makes which is half true is web applications run on a mobile phone can't beat or march the performance of a native app (at least not yet). This is like saying a PHP application is slower than an application written in C++. Of course it is going to be slower, but just like people have come up with solutions to improve the compilation speed of PHP, there are a lot of solutions out there that fix the shortcomings in mobile web applications (not completely), but it is better than it was say 3 years ago.

The advent of HTML5 and CSS3 is bridging the gap between mobile and native app performance. I've yet to see advancements in that area stagnate. Look at Famo.us, they built their own fully-integrated rendering layer engine and 3D physics engine which can get some pretty crazy high FPS even on an iPhone. Yes, it is still hacky, but this is the kind of Javascript stuff that wasn't possible three years ago, the performance of Javascript has increased by 1000 percent and gets better everyday thanks to the likes of Google and Firefox pushing the envelope.

Are we also forgoing the fact the fundamental difference between a web app and a native app is lack of control and openess? When you publish a native app to the iOS app store, you're surrendering control of part of your profits, your privacy and being forced to abide by Apple's developer guidelines right down to the design of your app. If your app isn't well-designed or functional enough, too much like another app or the biggie: if it competes with an app that Apple already have, it will be rejected. At least a web application cannot be rejected, it cannot be controlled and any money you make will mostly go to you (minus any third party fees like Paypal, etc).

Nobody can tell you what your app can do, say or think if it's a web app and that's the one thing native applications will never have (until we see the day Apple/Google/Microsoft let you distribute apps outside of the app store side-stepping their profit streams which will NEVER happen). You can't deny that not only is a web application free, it is truly cross-platform. Any device with web connectivity and a modern browser can access your web application. A native app can only run within the confines of the operating system it was built for.

A world without native and web applications would be a sad world. Because you would have these key gatekeepers controlling the app stores forcing you to pay yearly fees and telling you what you can and can't do with your own app. We need the web just as much as we need native apps.

Seems to me Techcrunch should be educating their writers, because this would have to be the worse and most uninformed article I have seen published on Techcrunch (or anywhere) in a very long time. The web as we know it, is evolving, not dying. You can't do everything on a mobile phone (at least not yet), especially if you're a developer. Lets not pretend native applications or mobile devices are a cure-all or drop in replacement for a desktop computer or web app, because they're not. Everything has its purpose and place (native and web apps have their advantages and disadvantages).

Sorry for the rant. I'm very passionate about the open web and seeing an article as ignorant as this proclaiming the end of the web is near really gets me worked up.

argonaut2• 12 years ago

Internet != Web.

DigitalSea2• 12 years ago

Care to elaborate why you posted this comment without context and why you felt the need to downvote me? Did you read the Techcrunch article? It was proclaiming native apps are killing web apps (which is exactly what my comment was referring to) I wasn't saying the Internet was the web...

Aqueous• 12 years ago

"Web is rapidly losing users" - Data? Anyone have some data on the web 'losing users?'

Most mobile apps communicate with their cloud backends using HTTP, so clearly the protocol itself isn't dying. What may be slowing in adoption is browser-based access to HTML/JavaScript-based sites, but I question that assumption too.

This idea that we need to burn it down to build a new technology stack for the web seems kind of laughable. Why would we do that when we could just replace the piece that is bothering us - JavaScript?

All technology after sufficient degree of adoption and maturity is really just layered hacks. What do you think Windows is? Win32 buried under .NET buried under whatever runtime Microsoft decides to release next year - Metro tacked on because they only thought of building tablet interfaces recently.

Even new features on the elegantly and robustly designed Mac OS X are starting to appear as afterthoughts.

But this is all besides the point. What Mobile apps tend not to have is links to other mobile apps, whereas the web is a federated network of inter-linked content, which leads to pretty powerful network effects. All mobile apps will ever do is create siloed walled gardens - on the other hand, the web is open. So I don't see how mobile apps could be siphoning users away from the web. At the very least they are complements to each other.

cborodescu• 12 years ago

Did it ever occur to anyone that instead of dying the Web is simply ... shifting!?

Basically the same metrics & trends are discussed here (https://medium.com/p/53e4de6c1630) but pieced together to form a more in depth analysis: The Mobile Web is not Dying ... It is Shifting

As Mobile Roars Ahead, the Web Is Dying

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