I have so many other issues with this model that are beyond the scope of not liking a router companion app, but no, I wasn’t aware it was a webapp. That makes it less bad.
universal services should be non-commodity utilities, or at least heavily regulated via antitrust or local monopoly conditions
FCC, FTC, etc. are toothless now, though.
Wonder how long till we get gamer RGB on our companion app’d routers
We already do. At least I’m pretty sure we do. There was software on DD-WRT to turn on the LED’s on the router, so one could just solder on RGB ones instead and boom.
But yeah on the topic of PWA’s; they’re awesome. As the specs get more fleshed out, there are better and better API’s for things to get stuff done that was only once available via native apps. So it’s great overall because it lowers technical dept and better long-term cross-platform support.
my main concerns with PWAs, and Webapps in general, are more issues of efficiency and the kinds of markets they create than their usefulness on their face.
No one wants to live in a world where things are universally distributed as a service model. It’s like living in a cotton mill village.
The current trend is ‘serverless’ PWA’s.
And as far as efficiency goes, they are fine. Except for things like games (but getting there thanks to WebAssembly).
The only issue with wasm is that JS and convienience focused frameworks exist. Very few use low level APIs if they don’t have to because it means that either individually they have to spend more time on development, and on a company level hire more skilled labor for longer. No one uses vulkan and the vast majority of DX12 games use middleware wrappers because MS paid them for exclusivity.
Also, arguably all webapps are slow and inefficient, pretty much because they’re webapps. You can interface with hardware a lot better if you aren’t constrained by building and validating for browsers instead of base systems. Webgl performance is pretty abysmal without heavy optimization, because of all the context switching issues in js. It should be just as performant as OGL, but it isn’t because of the medium.
e.g.
The only modern IM and group client for desktop that doesn’t take a gig+ of memory and doesn’t have memleak problems is telegram.
They’re the only one that wrote an actual piece of software instead of wrapping their webapp in electron or similar
heck of a coincidence.
Nodejs has native libraries to call directly compiled binaries written in C/C++ you know. So a PWA which uses this and or a combination of WASM for key performance sensitive areas will work just fine.
This is still bleeding edge stuff, so not a whole lot of people use it yet. But its only a matter of when, not how at this point.
not saying it isn’t inevitable, but real world performance has been consistently underwhelming so far. I want more than anyone for that trend to break.
also not necessarily a problem with the system, but webapps have the worst UX of any generation of software so far. It’s like no one designing them has ever heard the words “durable information interactions” or “parametrics”
The only borderline useable productivity webapp is google sheets, and even then it performs on large datasets badly compared to excel or even librecalc.
Unless you want web browsers to expand into some sort of generic container that interfaces with the OS as a hypervisor, I doubt performance is going to improve to the degree people want.
and for that reason, I will always fight for a space for native software. Even if it isn’t “forward thinking”
Honestly a lot of dev cultures could use a little design conservatism and respect for past constructs. They might be there because of old limitations, but the way they worked around them is a lot more efficient than what we’re doing now for a lot of stuff.
What are you even talking about at this point. This is a review thread about a home consumer product. 30,000 people have said if you’re afraid of Google don’t use it.
Now you’re talking about NodeJS performance and design patterns?
Come on dude.
yeah that got derailed a bit
for the nth time, not afraid of google, just pointing out there are other flaws in the product that aren’t tinfoil related, and having the only response be “you’re paranoid” etc.