> considering how much more inefficient using HTML/CSS/JS is compared to Java applets. Or is the latter not the case (honest question)?
It's a really interesting question actually because it's so hard to compare the two. On any objective measure, today's web apps are much better than applets in terms of responsiveness, etc. But then again, an applet could run on machines with 16MB of RAM total. I think you'd be hard pressed to get plain html page in a modern browser to run on a machine like that. Either way, in both cases we had a much better solution in native apps.
> 2. I was never bothered so much by the UI of a java applet looking different. What bothered me was that even very fundamental stuff like input fields and scrolling felt both alien and shittier than native.
Modern web apps can score better here, but quite often they don't. The more complex the become the less native they get, scrolling, text input, etc are generally OK (unless your an arshole that overrides scroll behaviour), but html still doesn't have an equivalent for native table views and the goodies (navigation, resizing, performance) that comes with them.
For me the skinning does matter though, I have a beautiful, consistent desktop that browsers (not even electron apps) shit all over. When something doesn't look quite right from the second you open it it magnifies all the other differences.
> Modern web apps can score better here, but quite often they don't. The more complex the become the less native they get, scrolling, text input, etc are generally OK (unless your an arshole that overrides scroll behaviour), but html still doesn't have an equivalent for native table views and the goodies (navigation, resizing, performance) that comes with them.
Oh yeah, complex UI stuff is definitely a good reason to avoid web apps.
But for many, probably even most apps it's precisely scrolling, text input, and other 'basic' stuff that matters, and in those cases a web app's 'default' will be more native.
> For me the skinning does matter though, I have a beautiful, consistent desktop that browsers (not even electron apps) shit all over. When something doesn't look quite right from the second you open it it magnifies all the other differences.
I agree on a personal level, but I suspect we're outliers. Can't substantiate that at the moment though, so I might be wrong.
It's a really interesting question actually because it's so hard to compare the two. On any objective measure, today's web apps are much better than applets in terms of responsiveness, etc. But then again, an applet could run on machines with 16MB of RAM total. I think you'd be hard pressed to get plain html page in a modern browser to run on a machine like that. Either way, in both cases we had a much better solution in native apps.
> 2. I was never bothered so much by the UI of a java applet looking different. What bothered me was that even very fundamental stuff like input fields and scrolling felt both alien and shittier than native.
Modern web apps can score better here, but quite often they don't. The more complex the become the less native they get, scrolling, text input, etc are generally OK (unless your an arshole that overrides scroll behaviour), but html still doesn't have an equivalent for native table views and the goodies (navigation, resizing, performance) that comes with them.
For me the skinning does matter though, I have a beautiful, consistent desktop that browsers (not even electron apps) shit all over. When something doesn't look quite right from the second you open it it magnifies all the other differences.