zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

>>Olympi+EJ
>This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

Who told you that? You can write entire C libraries and call them from Electron just fine. Browser is a native application after all. All this "native applications" debate boils down to the UI implementation strategy. Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on than a single web-based UI with shared logic

We already have three major OSes, all doing things differently. The browsers, on the other hand, use the same language, same rendering model, same layout system, and same accessibility layer everywhere, which is a massive abstraction win.

You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins just to say "it's native". If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.

>>gloosx+I92
It baffles me how much the discourse over native apps rarely takes this into consideration.

You reduce development effort by a third, it is ok to debate whether a company so big should invest into a better product anyway but it is pretty clear why they are doing this

>>gbaldu+rb2
There are cross platform GUI toolkits out there so while I am in team web for lots of reasons, generally it’s because web apps are faster and cheaper to iterate.

>>vlovic+Ah2
Cross platform GUIs might does have the same of support and distributed knowledge as HTML/CSS/JS. If that vendor goes away or the oss maintainers go a different direction, now you have an unsupported GUI platform.

>>mycall+yY2
I mean the initial release of Qt predates JavaScript by a few months and CSS by more than a year. GTK is only younger by a few years and both remain actively maintained.

Argument feels more like FUD than something rooted in factual reality.