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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • There are several issues with native development without a browser layer.

    First of all, native UI toolkits are very different and making a robust cross platform app is pretty much impossible. So, the traditional approach is to use one toolkit, which will be native to one platform, and then let your other users deal with it. For example, GTK apps on Windows and Mac look and feel like shit.

    Another approach is to use a custom cross platform toolkit, which doesn’t use anything native at all. If enough work and thought is put in such application, it can be a very pleasant experience. But often it’s shit for all users.

    The second issue is that it can be quite hard to manage fluid window sizes and to build a proper responsive UI with native toolkits. Some are better at it, some are worse. Native toolkits also tend to punish developers for deep nesting of components making UI development even more painful.

    HTML + CSS solves all that. It’s responsive by design, everyone is used to web apps already, nesting is not a problem at all, etc.