It's not. I feel the same way as 'interpol_p, and I'm an Windows/Linux + Android user.
The webapp ecosystem is making the same class of mistakes pure-Java UIs used to. They assume e.g. that a textbox is just a rectangle on a screen that you can type stuff in. But it's not just that; it's much more.
Each operating system has a large set of default UI behaviours and idiosyncrasies. Continuing the example, a native textbox may be a clickable rectangle accepting keyboard input, but it also has a set of well-defined behaviours for Tab-cycling, text navigation, right-click handling, keyboard shortcut handling, cut/copy/paste handling, etc. Web applications fail to replicate that functionality completely and consistently. And platform consistency is a feature - one that many users value.
On top of that add resource waste (spinning up a webview and parsing heavy markup languages just to show a bunch of buttons) and web-specific failure modes - many vendors do not care about making their webapp work correctly when connectivity is limited, spotty or lacking. Hence the occasional full-screen 404 or 501 or connection-lost error when you press a button.
I want my applications to be performant, platform-consistent and interoperable. Web apps fail at all three, hence I avoid them like the plague, and discourage everyone from developing them.
About the only benefit I, as a pro user, I get from web application is the relative ease one can reverse-engineer their backend APIs with.
>On top of that add resource waste (spinning up a webview and parsing heavy markup languages just to show a bunch of buttons)
Hold on - do you know what a progressive web app is? We're not talking about apps like Slack which bundle a browser inside of them - we're talking about webpages that behave like applications.
>many vendors do not care about making their webapp work correctly when connectivity is limited, spotty or lacking.
Offline support is a key feature of PWAs, so this point is moot.
>Each operating system has a large set of default UI behaviours and idiosyncrasies.
Browsers are completely able to define their own design language, so a text box need not look the same in every browser. As long as they conform to common standards, everything will work fine.
As such, you don't get the Java problem where everything must conform to the same style, and thus feels foreign in different environments.
>I want my applications to be performant, platform-consistent and interoperable. Web apps fail at all three
Text boxes in the web have had the same look & feel as native text boxes since between one and two decades ago.
When I right-click on the one I'm typing in right now, on Chrome running on a Mac, I even get an option to "Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track", whatever that might be, same as with the native text boxes.
The webapp ecosystem is making the same class of mistakes pure-Java UIs used to. They assume e.g. that a textbox is just a rectangle on a screen that you can type stuff in. But it's not just that; it's much more.
Each operating system has a large set of default UI behaviours and idiosyncrasies. Continuing the example, a native textbox may be a clickable rectangle accepting keyboard input, but it also has a set of well-defined behaviours for Tab-cycling, text navigation, right-click handling, keyboard shortcut handling, cut/copy/paste handling, etc. Web applications fail to replicate that functionality completely and consistently. And platform consistency is a feature - one that many users value.
On top of that add resource waste (spinning up a webview and parsing heavy markup languages just to show a bunch of buttons) and web-specific failure modes - many vendors do not care about making their webapp work correctly when connectivity is limited, spotty or lacking. Hence the occasional full-screen 404 or 501 or connection-lost error when you press a button.
I want my applications to be performant, platform-consistent and interoperable. Web apps fail at all three, hence I avoid them like the plague, and discourage everyone from developing them.
About the only benefit I, as a pro user, I get from web application is the relative ease one can reverse-engineer their backend APIs with.