I just read an article on Medium today that suggested browsers are becoming a thing of the past. To be honest, that suggestion makes me really mad.
Firstly, the fact that there’s not browser on an iWatch makes sense to me, as browsing on a watch would surely suck anyway, wouldn’t it? So that doesn’t suggest to me that web browsing is dying.
But the article also suggests that apps are taking over from web browsing, and that really concerns me. It seems to go against everything the web was meant to be, IMHO. If the web were to be funneled into a collection of proprietary, OS-based apps, I think we would lose something very precious.
I sure hope the article is wrong. What do you think?
It is. It’s a packaged chrome app. Uses 400+ MB of RAM. For a chat application, go figure.
I really don’t understand who in their right mind would think it a good idea to package and ship an app like that. At least when you’re using slack in a browser you can use the browser for other things as well, but with the slack app all that browser memory is dedicated to slack. I just don’t see the point.
If you want it in a separate window you can just create an app shortcut (in chrome anyway, settings > more tools > create application shortcuts…)
IMHO this is what an app is.
Although the same information can be found on the website, the app is a direct link to the local weather conditions in “real time”.
Users get the information they’re looking for without needing to click around to get at it.
The information is presented without the usual “distractions” of a website.
They say that you can’t be logged more than one slack chart room on the browser… I think I’ve read that in their documentation. But I’m not very reliable
I love the browser but I’m normally on a PC. I know for a fact that mobile browsing is big in places like China, far more popular than desktop browsing is over here. If your target audience is on a phone then there are advantages to using an app over a normal browser.
An app will run natively on a phone allowing for better performance. I know WebGL hardware acceleration is blacklisted on a lot of mobile GPU’s which hurts when it comes to playing HD video or more advanced animations.
Another advantage is the fact you can control the environment your application is going to run in. You don’t have to worry about CSS hacks/plugins missing or even something as simple as client side javascript being disabled.
There may be times when a browser can’t do the job properly, but people seem to rush into apps far too quickly. I’ve seen a lot of apps that offer nothing over the normal browser experience, and where I have a choice to use a browser instead of an app, I usually prefer the browser. If you take the argument for apps to its extreme—where there’s a separate app for every site on the web—you can see how ridiculous the situation becomes.
Totally agree with this. The reason for heading towards apps is entirely self interest. Apps can quietly gather a lot more information about the user than a website can. What we really need is a push towards app privacy. The facebook app for android requires permissions for pretty much everything on the phone. If it was an option I’m sure it would ask for root access.
As an aside, it’d be nice if there was a sandbox mode on phones which allowed you to install the app in its own sandbox that couldn’t access anything on the phone other than in its own sandbox. Then the facebook app can ask for all the permissions it wants, it cant actually access anything unless I specifically give it access to it.
Only if you’ve already got it. The thing about a website is that I can go to any website whenever I want … whereas you have to find, download and install an app first. So unless it’s a site/app that you’re going to be using a lot, it’s slower, more cumbersome and takes more data to use the app than just to visit the website in a browser.
