There’s some generalizations happening in here that are being presented without appropriate context. Using react native is not significantly different from using most other native UI libraries. If you’re going to condemn them for using it you should understand that a lot of the desktop software you currently use is likely built in a very similar manner; Firefox, discord, vscode, to name a few, all use technologies developed for the browser to render their UI. They can be implemented in performant ways with careful consideration.
The problem with using it here is that even at its most performant, React Native is still an abstraction layer that incurs a performance penalty and introduces complexities that could result in unintended behaviors. The start menu is always on, heavily used, and critical for operation. It should be one of the most heavily optimized and stable pieces of software in the operating system, and using react native indicates that it probably isn’t. Which suggests either they have misplaced priorities around optimization, or they’ve completely abandoned it as a goal.
Your examples were a browser, a browser that only shows one website, and the same browser as the previous but it shows a different website. Firefox is fine since its whole purpose is being a browser, but Discord and VS Code could and should be written native (with a better language than the garbage that is JS).
Yeah, I deliberately stated examples that used tech developed for the web. If you’d like me to list more apps that use shitty UI abstractions I can but it didn’t feel relevant to the point I was making.
Firefox, for example, didn’t use web components previously, and instead used a clunky XML based system called XUL. Which also sucked ass and was a chore to use. QT looks like shit. Visual Basic is proprietary microsoft garbage that requires special software and makes me want to die.
What UI framework do you recommend they switch to for Discord, an application built entirely in HTML/CSS and JS intentionally so that it could run in a browser window?
There’s some generalizations happening in here that are being presented without appropriate context. Using react native is not significantly different from using most other native UI libraries. If you’re going to condemn them for using it you should understand that a lot of the desktop software you currently use is likely built in a very similar manner; Firefox, discord, vscode, to name a few, all use technologies developed for the browser to render their UI. They can be implemented in performant ways with careful consideration.
The problem with using it here is that even at its most performant, React Native is still an abstraction layer that incurs a performance penalty and introduces complexities that could result in unintended behaviors. The start menu is always on, heavily used, and critical for operation. It should be one of the most heavily optimized and stable pieces of software in the operating system, and using react native indicates that it probably isn’t. Which suggests either they have misplaced priorities around optimization, or they’ve completely abandoned it as a goal.
Your examples were a browser, a browser that only shows one website, and the same browser as the previous but it shows a different website. Firefox is fine since its whole purpose is being a browser, but Discord and VS Code could and should be written native (with a better language than the garbage that is JS).
Yeah, I deliberately stated examples that used tech developed for the web. If you’d like me to list more apps that use shitty UI abstractions I can but it didn’t feel relevant to the point I was making.
Firefox, for example, didn’t use web components previously, and instead used a clunky XML based system called XUL. Which also sucked ass and was a chore to use. QT looks like shit. Visual Basic is proprietary microsoft garbage that requires special software and makes me want to die.
What UI framework do you recommend they switch to for Discord, an application built entirely in HTML/CSS and JS intentionally so that it could run in a browser window?