
Rise of the meta-platforms and the new 'web browser' - mmahemoff
https://paul.kinlan.me/rise-of-the-meta-platforms/
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jakub_g
Regarding performance, I've noticed this weird attitude of some people that
when I say, hey, I know how to make our mobile web faster, the answer is
"users don't care" / "low prio". Those same people say, yeah, we need a native
app, it will be so much more smooth, performant and everything!

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kinlan
What's the answer? Is it just wait it out?

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thanatropism
STOP. USING. SO MUCH. CLIENT-SIDE. RENDERING.

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byron_fast
If the web can beat Microsoft in 1998, it will beat Apple as well. It doesn't
look that way today, but the cracks are showing. I suppose if it became
significantly easier to create an app than a website, the walled gardens could
win, but that doesn't seem likely.

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kinlan
Author here. My thought around this is not that Apple will win, it is that
there are other platforms now (hosted on Apple and Android platforms) that sit
at the same level as the web sites and they have large audiences interacting
with them daily. Facebook and WeChat in China are examples of this.

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byron_fast
The weird thing about messaging is those platforms tend to be very fluid. They
look dominant, but fade fast.

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Detrus
Yea, the browser based web keeps losing market share. First to mobile apps,
now to dedicated document readers. Both performance problems. But the slow
document problem is not very technical, mostly politics. There's no mechanism
for enforcing requirements across a wild west of bloat.

Flash's demise was for similar reasons. Bloat caused by over eager developers
gained it a reputation for slow loading times and unusable websites. In this
case the usable web is punished too.

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kinlan
Interesting thoughts. I wonder if Content Blockers or user-agent interventions
can enforce requirements
[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-
dev/qkKBfJv7ey4)

Also, Google Search did it for mobileness (pushing a down rank) on none mobile
friendly site (for mobile users). Developers and businesses tend to see these
as sticks and not carrots

