alt Hacker NewsThe UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich.
What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-level windows.
Another PITA: Electron apps repeatedly bundle large portions of Chromium, leading to unnecessary overhead. Those duplicated modules lead to bloated RAM usage: every app has its own Chromium copy and OS must keep all that zoo in RAM without a possibility of reusing the otherwise shareable parts.
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> sufficiently performant
In no universe is HTML performant compared to actual desktop applications. It sucks big time.
I've been hearing that for 10+ years. This is not going to happen.
That’s the strategy of 20 years ago.
HTML and CSS are also absurdly hard to actually do anything useful with or interactive compared to normal desktop or app frameworks.
Orders of magnitude more BS, plumbing, awkwardness, head scratching, etc.
There's a competing webapp-wrapper framework that explicitly uses the platform's own browser, but developers don't like being at the mercy of whatever the OS ships...
not exactly the same, but worth noting that in a spectacular display of being too early, microsoft shipped this 30 years ago (active desktop in 1997 merged the windows explorer with internet explorer, turning folders into web pages).