I’ve said this on Paul’s site, but my big problem with Web Apps over native isn’t the look, it is the use of resources and security, they are incredibly heavy, often consuming several hundred megabytes or a gigabyte of RAM, before the application even gets started, compared to a “native” app.
Even a .Net “native” app is better, because it gets its security updates direct from Microsoft and the libraries are shared between all running programs, whereas web apps are a humungous blob for each app that needs all those Chromium security updates that come out on a weekly basis updated on an individual basis.
Got 20 .Net applications running? 1 set of libraries, 1 update from Microsoft.
Got 20 web apps running? You have 20 copies of the Chromium wrapper running and each of them needs to be updated individually by the relevant developer, which means that each of those developers has to keep up to date on the Chromium, and through it Electron, patches and needs to role those out within 24 hours of them becoming available, yet many go months with no security updates being rolled out. And that is without taking into account any security risks in the applications themselves.
Web Apps are a security nightmare, more so than some native app that is getting its core libraries updated by Microsoft either monthly or with emergency patches for zero days.
So, web apps:
take up way more disk space than is actually needed - a small, simple editor with a few megabytes of “code” still needs couple of GB of space for the Chromium baggage
it takes up way more memory - because each application needs to load its own complete Chromium (Electron) runtime, instead of using shared libraries, like native applications
It is way less efficient - so is slower and uses more battery than a native application
It is less secure - because you not only have to ensure that the web app itself is secure, but you have to ensure that you roll out the Chromium patches in a timely manner; which many developers either don’t have the resources to do, or they don’t care or don’t know about Chromium security and how it affects their app.
Paul mentioned “if you’re stuck on 23h2 it’s because an incompatibility”. My previous desktop was locked at 23H2 and I’m pretty sure it’s because I ran a Win11 debloater Paul recommended many years around. It removed core windows services where Windows Update refused to touch my system because it viewed it as a terribly broken install. Even the nvidia app (geforce experience) would never let me install updates through it’s interface. I had to go manually run the updater. It was weird. It’s not a huge deal, I’d probably still deal with it again. Although now I’m just running stock 25H2 in Ireland / EU mode which already disables all the telemetry and whatnot. It’s always preferable to be as close to stock as possible if you value things just working.
It’s possible I also messed something up, but my system components should’ve been compatible. it’s in the past, I have a new better system now.
I normally don’t care for the whiskey segment but this episode’s story was pretty good.
