[m-schuetz]

> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?

Not going to happen until gui frameworks are as comfortable and easy to set up and use as html. Entry barrier and ergonomics are among the biggest deciding factors of winning technologies.

[lpcvoid]

Man, you never used Delphi or Lazarus then. That was comfortable and easy. Web by comparison is just a jarring mess of unfounded complexity.

[dsego]

There are cross platform concerns as well. If the option is to build 3-4 separate apps in different languages and with different UI toolkits to support all the major devices and operating systems, or use the web and be 80% there in terms of basic functionality, and also have better branding, I think the choice is not surprising.

[mrweasel]

In line with "the web was a mistake" I think the idea that you can create cross platform software is an equally big mistake.

You can do the core functionality of your product as cross platform, to some extend, but once you hit the interaction with the OS and especially the UI libraries of the OS, I think you'd get better software if you just accept that you'll need to write multiple application.

We see this on mobile, there's just two target platform really, yet companies don't even want to do that.

The choice isn't surprising, in a world where companies are more concerned with saving and branding, compared to creating good products.

[asdff]

There is a lot of stuff you can get done with the standard library alone of various languages that play nice on all major platforms. People tend to reach for whatever stack of dependencies is popular at the time, however.

[qsera]

I am not sure, it seems that cross platform Applciations are possible using something like python3/gtk/qt etc.

[arexxbifs]

Visual Basic solved that. The web is in many ways a regression.

[dvdkon]

Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps, but those GUIs were rather static and limited by today's standards. People have now gotten used to responsive GUIs that resize to any window size, easy dynamic hiding of controls, and dynamic lists in any part of the GUI; you won't get them to come back to a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`.

[0dayz]

I feel that flutter is the first right step for this, it felt like a breath of fresh air to work with compared to the webstack.

[asdff]

Are they not? Gui libraries are like button(function=myFunction). This isn't rocket surgery stuff here at least the gui tooling I've used.

[m-schuetz]

Pretty much any non-web GUI framework I tried so far has either been terrible to set up, or terrible to deploy. Or both. Electron is stupidly simple.

ImGUI is the single exception that has been simple to set up, trivial to deploy (there is nothing to deploy, including it is all that's needed), and nice to use.