The problem is that most of Lemmy is old and afraid of change. They look back on old style applications with nostalgia while completely forgetting all of the issues from that era.
On the one hand, people complain about bloat. Do you need to have a full browser underneat? I mean, do you even need js support for most of the UI requirements be done with just html+js + passing callbacks to the underlying language?
On the one hand, web frontend has proven to be so versatile. It makes moving applications from/to remote/local a bit easier, and you don’t have to learn “yet anonter script/language” just to draw buttons
Needing to run a full-fledged browser in the background in order to display your html/css frontend adds a lot more performance cost than necessary, making the app eat up far more RAM and CPU than necessary. It probably also introduces a lot more security vulnerability concerns that an otherwise simple app shouldn’t have to worry about. And then there’s the dependency chain you’re introducing – now your app needs to be updated every time the underlying browser gets an important update … and maybe needs to be tweaked/rewritten to accommodate that browser update if it changes the way the browser interacts with your app frontend.
There are plenty of other GUI frontend frameworks that are also expressive, simple, and well-known, without all of these potential problems associated with them.
I am not web or ui dev. But I think using html/css as frontend seems kind of reasonable, no? Expressive enough, simple enough, well known
What is the problem? Too heavy to interpret?
The problem is that most of Lemmy is old and afraid of change. They look back on old style applications with nostalgia while completely forgetting all of the issues from that era.
I am thinking that:
On the one hand, people complain about bloat. Do you need to have a full browser underneat? I mean, do you even need js support for most of the UI requirements be done with just html+js + passing callbacks to the underlying language?
On the one hand, web frontend has proven to be so versatile. It makes moving applications from/to remote/local a bit easier, and you don’t have to learn “yet anonter script/language” just to draw buttons
I can understand the hate for Electron as it poorly designed.
However, I don’t see anything wrong with the Fedora installer. It runs Firefox so you aren’t really getting any additional bloat.
Needing to run a full-fledged browser in the background in order to display your html/css frontend adds a lot more performance cost than necessary, making the app eat up far more RAM and CPU than necessary. It probably also introduces a lot more security vulnerability concerns that an otherwise simple app shouldn’t have to worry about. And then there’s the dependency chain you’re introducing – now your app needs to be updated every time the underlying browser gets an important update … and maybe needs to be tweaked/rewritten to accommodate that browser update if it changes the way the browser interacts with your app frontend.
There are plenty of other GUI frontend frameworks that are also expressive, simple, and well-known, without all of these potential problems associated with them.
It can be an issue when done incorrectly
In this case the Fedora web UI was developed over a long period so it was thoughtfully built.