
Is the web dying? The state of affairs in 2016 - luisvieira_gmr
https://medium.com/the-ui-files/is-the-web-dying-the-state-of-affairs-in-2016-2aad56ef8466#.1n2szz1ig
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prof_hobart
For me, mobile web and native app are largely solving two different use cases.

If it's one of the handful of places that I use regularly, and want frequent
quick access to, it's probably going to be an app. I use apps for my main news
sites, for my bus timetable, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc.

If it's an occasional visit it's going to be the web. I'm not going to be
downloading dedicated apps just to browse a forum that I've been to a couple
of times ever, if I'm just trying to check prices across a whole bunch of
shops or if I'm trying to get the opening time of a restaurant.

There are a few that fall into the middle ground of visiting every now and
then. But for the vast majority of the time there's a pretty clear web/app
split, at least for me.

~~~
berns
That's why progressive web apps are so interesting. It's only after you visit
a site a couple of times that the banner to add to home screen appears. And
you don't have to download a whole app, just the app shell. If you visit a
site sporadically, you are not bothered by the constant updates that you
suffer with native apps.

~~~
wvenable
Is updates a bother? If I didn't get notified (and you can turn that off) I'd
never know if my apps were updated.

A lot of commentary tries too hard to invent problems with native apps to
level the field with web app applications.

~~~
JohnDotAwesome
> A lot of commentary tries too hard to invent problems with native apps to
> level the field with web app applications.

I don't necessarily disagree with that, but...

> Is updates a bother?

Yeah, kind of. Maybe just because I'm slow to update (my OS and my apps), but
every couple of months, my apps break because I need to update (app devs
apparently don't care about breaking older versions of their apps with API
updates). On my iPhone5, I'll open an app (say, Facebook or Lyft), it starts
up and then immediately crashes. This is how I know an update is available. I
download the update, and yay, I can use the app again.

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kevin_thibedeau
The internet is dying. It is becoming ever harder to do anything outside of
port 80.

~~~
dingaling
I have literally just encountered this using free hospital WiFi. Ports 80 and
443 open but ssh, SMTP and IMAP are all silently dropped.

Workaround is to tunnel those over 80 which in turn reinforces the dominance
of web ports.

~~~
kazinator
ISP blocking of port 25 significantly curtails the spam problem. Imagine if
every subscriber could connect to any SMTP server in the world and send an
e-mail.

I agree that too aggressive port blocking is a problem, though.

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chasing
"Is the web dying?"

First chart:

"Desktop" (which I assume means "desktop browsers"): Up 15%, 2013-2015.

"Mobile Browser": Up 53%, 2013-2015.

So: No?

~~~
johansch
Mobile apps: +90%

~~~
venomsnake
Of course 90+ of those is messengers/facebook/twitter/instagram.

~~~
walterbell
Does discovery of new apps take place via web/search or social media? App
Store discovery is not great.

------
dasil003
I don't see much competition between apps and the web, they have very
different use cases and evolution characteristics. The web will never be able
to compete with an app SDK for performance, OS integration, and ease of
development. But on the other hand, no app SDK will ever be able to target
_all_ platforms the way the web can as a defacto standard which all vendors
must implement to be considered a general purpose computing device.

I see the web as a sort of unstoppable blob of a standard which moves forward
slowly, but is constantly growing in use cases. No vendor or even a consortium
has the power to supplant it. The only thing that would kill the web is
something which makes it irrelevant, but apps will not be that thing, it will
be some other force or trend which we aren't really seeing yet.

~~~
bobajeff
I think it can get close to competing with a native SDK in performance. With
WebGL2, SIMD.js, JavaScript shared memory threads and WebAssembly it could get
close enough that few will care about the difference.

I think ease of development really depends on the developer and tools.

I can't speak for OS integration as it has never interested me to a great
extent as a user. I'm sure some users care but I don't.

~~~
rimantas
Anyone making such claims usually has no idea what native SDK are capable of.

~~~
bobajeff
I admit that I don't know what I'm talking about. Care to enlighten me on what
native SDK's are capable of?

~~~
dasil003
Controlling audio by headset, background processing, serverless data syncing,
register capabilities to make the app auto-open for a specific intent, direct
connection to the hardware capabilities, etc, etc.

Note that it's not impossible for these things to exist for the web, but by
virtue of how these products and standards are developed, web standards will
never catch up unless Apple and Google somehow decided that web standards were
the way forward and to nerf their native SDK development efforts.

~~~
bobajeff
Thanks for your answer. I was asking mainly about performance related
capabilities. What can native SDK's do that SIMD, shared memory multi-
threading, and GL API's won't address?

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IshKebab
Mobile websites were never very good. Websites either don't have one, or they
have a cut down one that doesn't let you see the full site (e.g. the HSBC
mobile site only lets you check balances - wtf?). Combine that with huge
cookie warnings and ads that take up most of the screen and you end up with a
pretty bad experience.

~~~
phee
Add slow loading... not really bad by itself but terrible when the partially
loaded pages constantly move and rearrange as new elements are ready.

~~~
k__
Technically this is a solved problem, but somehow no one cares enough.

Bad people would say, companies make them bad on purpose, so people get apps
and can be tracked better.

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PaulHoule
I hear this message a lot from the press but I don't believe it.

Have you actually used a mobile app? I agree mobile apps let you use the
gyroscope and things like that, but for reading content, at least on a tablet,
the ordering is

real web site >> mobile web site >> app

For instance I went to the imgur site, it told me to download the app, then i
could not find the content I was looking at on the site.

~~~
christogreeff
Consuming content from the same site, on different devices is flawed. When I
know a site, and go to mobile site the experience differs so much sometimes,
that it might as well be a different site. In my perception, the reason is
that someone else decides what is important to me, on the smaller format.

~~~
tenkabuto
I think that your issue is moreso that the site doesn't have consistent
prioritization of certain types of content.

This presents an interesting issue regarding prioritization and expectations:
on the Desktop view, both a central content column and a side bar (say, off to
the right) are visible above the fold; the central column has a higher
prioritization than the side bar. One might think, then, that for mobile views
the side bar should be put beneath the central column, as it has lower a
prioritization. But if you do that, you push content that is above the fold on
Desktop view to below the fold on mobile, which goes against expectations that
you may have set in the user's mind when they use Desktop view. Might you
truncate the content column (assuming it's an article) and provide a Read More
button to fit in some contents of the side bar above the fold?

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ProxCoques
I don't know if it's just me having a bad day, but I can hardly concentrate on
what this guy is saying due to his over-use of commas.

Anyone else, find these commas, distracting and, weird?

~~~
kazinator
Those are run-on sentences of the "comma splice" variety. This could be a non-
native English writer, coming from a language in whose written conventions
(orthography), independent clauses can be correctly joined by a comma.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice)

------
christogreeff
Is it just me who finds the big blocks of links, throughout the article, quite
distracting?

~~~
nailer
Not just you. Most articles would just have a link that refers to 'Apple's
announcement of the iPad Pro' rather than an excerpt and a thumbnail of an
iPad pro. Medium normally has a pleasant reading experience, this wasn't.

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runewell
It depends what you consider "the web" to be at this point. If you consider
domain names, web server software, and data formats / protocols created for
the web to be part of "the web" then I would argue that nearly all of the
mobile apps use "the web" in some capacity. If you're referring to only
browser-accessible web properties then I would say it's increasing at an
incredible pace, just not as incredible a pace as mobile. Mobile is king right
now but it's hard to predict the future, perhaps Augmented Reality takes over,
or perhaps mobile is the first to enter emerging markets but as the cost and
size of computers decrease we may see an eventual surge in desktop machines
with web browser access. I look at the web as the "safe zone" or default last-
resort method of accessing the Internet. I don't think it will go away anytime
soon until we have a superior alternative that provides the convenience,
efficiency, and level of open access to information that we see today.

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pjdorrell
One group of people will always want to access the open web on a large screen
via a web browser running on a general purpose computer: software developers.

If the web "dies", then the non-web will also die, or at least it won't be
very healthy, because the developers won't have the infrastructure they need
to efficiently develop the required non-web software.

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simbalion
Apps are a fad. Mobile devices are heavy and people will get sick of their
novelty, as people do with all new toys after awhile. Many of us probably
understand this as we were using mobile devices long before the iphone
existed.

In contrast, "the web" or something like it, will exist forever.

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kazinator
> _these days native apps seem to consistently provide better experiences than
> their web counterparts, with better performance, smoother animations, and
> fully integrated with the device OS._

These days? When have native apps _not_ had these properties?

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sotojuan
Mobile web can be just as good as apps for a lot of (not all) use cases but
only if people put enough effort into them like say, Google does with their
PWA initiative. Anything less than that and apps win.

~~~
rimantas
Mobile web can be as good (or better) in just one case—reading the content.

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anotheryou
Worth mentioning is, that so far we remain free to build alternative niches
(even though they will have a hard time to become mainstream). Net neutrality
remains especially important for that.

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nailer
As of a month ago, we (as in the web) have finally got window.payment on the
way (or whatever Apple and Google's different payment APIs are actually
implemented as). I'm happy.

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greenspot
It's not dying but it's a saturated market where almost every problem has been
solved in the past 20 years.

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franze
No.

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T-A
TLDR: Total time spent on desktop web was up 16% from June 2013 to June 2015;
on mobile web it was up 53%. So, no.

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sktrdie
Native apps and Web apps are essentially the same thing. They're both running
inside a sandbox environment (be it the OS or the browser). The real
difference is that the Web sandbox is more constrained. Other than that (and
yes I'm looking at you people who think URIs are the coming of jesus), there's
really no difference between the two.

Inevitably the platform which has less constraints will win.

~~~
philippnagel
There is another difference. Imagine a world where websites have to be
approved by the browser vendor in order to be loadable. That's a constraint of
native apps.

~~~
sktrdie
Meh, on the Web you're still constrained by DNS... governments can shutdown
specific sites.

~~~
dasil003
Doesn't really merit the "Meh" unless you think all world governments
coordinating their censorship is as likely as Apple rejecting your app.

