logoalt Hacker News

bigstrat2003 • today at 5:45 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

On the contrary: using a web view is the worst possible UX for your users. It's slow, uses a ton of memory, and doesn't integrate well with the desktop. The only reason people ever did it was laziness, not because it produced a better product.


Replies

Rohansi • today at 6:14 PM

I'd argue that being slow and using a ton of memory has more to do with (very) poorly optimized websites rather than blaming browsers as a whole. Sure, they'll never be as efficient as native, but people put a lot of work into optimizing browsers and most websites are never optimized.

Memory use alone is an interesting case for comparison because websites tend to have a lot more images/videos loaded than other applications. All of those PNGs and JPEGs need to be decompressed before you can paint them to the screen which makes them much larger.

➕ show 1 reply