

As Mobile Roars Ahead, the Web Is Dying - prostoalex
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/as-mobile-roars-ahead-its-time-to-finally-admit-the-world-wide-web-is-dying/

======
DigitalSea
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.

~~~
argonaut
Internet != Web.

~~~
DigitalSea
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...

~~~
argonaut
Can you elaborate on why you assumed I downvoted you? Because I didn't.

Mobile apps are interfacing with Internet servers (that they usually do so
over HTTP is irrelevant, since Web refers to hypertext documents).

------
Aqueous
"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.

------
slacka
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.

------
cborodescu
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](https://medium.com/p/53e4de6c1630)) but
pieced together to form a more in depth analysis: The Mobile Web is not Dying
... It is Shifting

