this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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There are a couple of functions that web apps almost always have and that native apps tend to lack: (1) selecting and copying text from anywhere in the app to the clipboard; (2) bookmarking individual views within the app. Of course, natives apps in principle could be faster and use more of your hardware βin practice though, they tend to be horribly bloated electron crapps. π So yeah, a decent native app can be better than a web app, but good luck finding one for your purpose.
This is an underappreciated benefit of the Web starting out as a bunch of documents, and then becoming an application platform. Even web apps are very text-first. Copy/past and crtl+F tend to work on most pages. And the fact that most views can be accessed via URL is handier than many people realize.
How could I forget to mention ctrl+f!
Electron "apps" are just glorified web pages anyhow. Native applications do offer superior performance as they are AOT compiled code. The ones that are written in rust, c, c++ etc, and if they are gui applications use frameworks like QT or GTK+. They are called native since they are compiled to machine code and are directly executable in the cpu without any kind of runtime like electron browser, java or python.
And even among runtime environments some are much better than others. I don't really mind dotNet or the JVM that much, but Electron seems particularly wasteful. I don't use a single Electron app.