> I feel sorry for those stuck in web development.

Don't. They get so much for free that other developers have to work on hard (flexible data binding, easy portability and trivial deployment).

> They insisted on pushing no bytecode for the web. Wanting us to rely on Eich's JS + rest of the webstack monstrosity requiring ugly hacks.

I fully agree here. The whole "JS is not that bad" mindset is firmly ingrained in people's minds, which is a shame.

I don't see (comparatively) a lot of people targeting the Windows 8 app store that's been available for 2 years already. Most Windows deployment is either ad-hoc exe's or centrally administered msi's. What's changing with Windows 10?

Win10 and it's (likely) XP/7 popularity level is a dark horse for native apps, and looming blow for the webapp movement. Which I believe has gotten a very long free-pass thanks to the most popular platform not having a cohesive appstore ready (on a popular OS).

Win8 IMO is almost irrelevant, the marketshare isn't there to add a MS Store option for me or many others. The corporations haven't and won't hop on. Everyone is (IMO rightly) focused on iOS/Android/web at the moment. Agreed on MSIs, but I'd add the customizable corporate frontend stores should be more powerful and slick than the current method (same appstore for MS desktop and mobile). It's possible once enterprise moves to the MS Store that MS mobile devices make major inroads. For consumers, I think they'll rejoice at Win10, upgrade to it and by default go to the MS Store for security reasons alone. Not to mention auto-updates, same apps as on MS mobile etc.

I'm not pro-MS, I'm actually anti-all-for-profits and a Mozilla fanboy. I just disagree with Eich on a bytecode for the web, he blew it as far as the web being the prime delivery mechanism for apps is concerned. The webstack sucks, it had to go. Too late now.

I understand my view isn't popular at the moment. Especially among webdevs who are most likely to be reading this HN post. Those people have invested heavily in the webapp dream with their time, skills and careers. Anything to the contrary that it was a great idea is going to get downvoted. Regardless, I think this is an accurate reading of the foreseeable future.

Isn't half of newer windows apps/widgets are just html wrappers, something similar to smart desktop or how they called it in win95/98? Haven't used windows for longer than it needs to switch on IE8 for more than 2 years.

>Regardless, I think this is an accurate reading of the foreseeable future

It's not accurate at all though.

Good thing we'll see if my prediction, or your non-contribution turns up correct in the next 2 years then.

Your prediction relies on a windows app store somehow making the web irrelevant which is amazingly unlikely and counter to every trend of the last 20 years. I suspect you have some emotional investment in the Microsoft ecosystem that is coloring your perspective.

My prediction is that your prediction is dead wrong. Nothing will stop the web, certainly not your app store dystopia, and certainly not the way Microsoft would run it.

I never spoke in absolutes, as you are. I said it was a blow to the webapp movement. Webapp movement defined here as a universal application deployment.

Presuming about my intentions or feelings towards the MS ecosystem is ridiculous. I had courses on VB6 in the late 90s, that's the closest and most exposure I've ever had to their ecosystem. I do wish I knew C# now that .Net is merging with Mono though. I see no shame in that. I don't hate MS anymore than I do Google, Apple, Oracle or ANY for-profit. For-profit means not-in-my-best-interests.

"Nothing will stop the web" sounds way too much like the idiotic quote, "always bet on JS". I'm not betting on JS with Eich, but I'm not against the web. Certainly my HN post of what I think will happen, won't affect that outcome.

I'm with (I believe) most everyone in supporting webapps being the universal delivery mechanism for apps in the future. Where did I say I wasn't? I also think there was a limited window of opportunity for this to take off. That window roughly being 2004-2014. Today, native apps are still on top.

Webapps will continue on in some form. But with Apple and Google already having appstores, will a popular version of Windows with an appstore be the closing of that door? That door being defined as webapps becoming the dominant application delivery platform. Yes, I think so.

But as of today, I fully believe webapps were/are hobbled during their glory years by the webstack, the web needed a bytecode.

If someone merely looking at circumstances and speaking on them bothers you so much, you are likely someone who speaks only to persuade others to your viewpoint. I'm not trying to persuade you and don't care where you stand. Frankly, I'm more than likely aligned with your views on webapps. I just personally find the webstack inconducive with the goal.

Action needed to be taken at a high level (likely at Mozilla, to make the webstack legacy and introduce a new bytecode standard), in a window of opportunity while the last major player (MS) was essentially out of the appstore business. I don't see it happening in time now. We'll see, but I predict it is you who has an emotional investment in the webstack.

Good god, let's hope this dystopian future you speak of doesn't actually come to pass. Can you imagine having to launch a separate native app for Hacker News, Facebook, Github, Amazon, Ebay, etc, all of which go far beyond "document sharing and simple data collection/retrieval"? I think you are grossly overestimating the usability of having so many desktop applications and glossing over the pain in the ass it is to develop multiple versions of said applications just to be cross-platform.

> Can you imagine having to launch a separate native app for Hacker News, Facebook, Github, Amazon, Ebay, etc

Best I'm aware, a lot of these apps exist already. The step we've yet to reach is "having to launch" instead of merely being able to launch. We probably will for some of them, though.

Speaking for myself, the dystopian present and near-future has me a lot more worried than a hypothetical future with apps: I've lost count of the number of websites which used to work fine on a 1st gen iPad and which now either refuse to work on grounds its browser is too old (e.g. Github), or outright frequently crash its browser owing to out of memory errors due to excessive use of javascript (e.g. most news site).

> Best I'm aware, a lot of these apps exist already.

Very few people use them, however.

> I've lost count of the number of websites which used to work fine on a 1st gen iPad and which now either refuse to work on grounds its browser is too old (e.g. Github), or outright frequently crash its browser owing to out of memory errors due to excessive use of javascript (e.g. most news site).

The situation isn't that great for native apps either. Most times, you're lucky if an app has targeted more than just one platform. And try running modern native apps on the 1st gen iPad; developers leave old tech in the dust regardless of which platform their targeting.

I will agree that web apps need to get better in general and work within the constraints of the browser, and that news sites should have as little complicated javascript as possible (or at least sensible fallbacks), but that's not a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For a wide swath of applications, the web is the only truly ubiquitous deployment target and when done right (Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Hacker News, etc) web apps can reach a much larger user base for same development time than native apps can.

I work on both apps and the web. My preference and long-term bet is definitely on the web - app stores are mostly a tool for locking customers in; they're superficially attractive to both customers as devs, but in the long run they're also too restrictive for both and too tied to the interests of the app store producers - the Apple app store for example has been used to effectively ban alternative browsers, force Google apps to be second class citizens on the store, stop Amazon from selling ebooks with a buy button in their app, etc, etc - all actions which are in the interests of Apple, but not of customers or developers. That's before you get into the problems of rewriting your stack n times because the different platforms want to force you into using their stack to develop with and constantly work to make creating a cross platform product infeasible, with n increasing each time a new device is announced.

For all the faults of web development, I also prefer it over having to work within the blessed stack chosen for me by the OS vendor, and being forced to migrate every few years as they decide their old stack isn't worth maintaining (secretly I wonder if this constant churn is not also useful to them on some level, it stops app devs every considering other platforms, they're running just to stay still). In contrast web development means you can choose your own tools, you are not limited to using javascript if you don't subscribe to this latest fad that all logic must be in the front-end written in javascript (which never appeared interesting and unstoppable to me at least), and adhere to the original interfaces of the web which was so dumb and simple it was incredibly powerful:

Simple text files (markup, styles) sent over the network to the client, which interprets them in a predictable way to show your UI and data (the predictable part has improved much over the last decade).

I do agree with you though that not having a bytecode for the web is a severe restriction on front-end development, and means that I prefer doing backend web work and using js in a limited way for ajax etc, not trying to use it to generate entire documents/UIs. Personally I find JS is fine for limited tasks, but not for writing apps in without quite a lot of pain. I expect that to be addressed at some point soon though, either by asm.js (not optimal), or something like Nacl. Till then, it's bliss working in whatever tools I want on the backend, even switching out tools if I want to, without the end user even knowing that I'm using a different stack - to them what is important is the app, not what it is written in - that is as it should be, and not something you see on other platforms. That's the attraction of web development for me, and one that native development will never equal.

I disagree that webapps will die - I think they'll just evolve and eventually will become universal applications based on HTML. Javascript will die, but not the web. However that is really a political question about how hard OS vendors will push users towards native apps (where they make money both from sales and more importantly from lock-in).

Will OS vendors continue to dominate computing? I think that's a more interesting question, and one we'll see play out over the next few decades. The web may yet reduce native platforms to a set of badly debugged device drivers.