Web Interfaces/Web Apps - opinions
So a discussion came up at work, with a friend of mine talking about building an app for his services, but making it a web app to save costs.
Personally, I hate them. They are the devils own idea. They suck harder than a hard sucking thing. The main reason for my diatribe against web apps/web interfaces is web browsers themselves, as well as the uselessly written and un-maintained plugins used by big-name vendors to jerry-rig them to work with their hardware. Browsers suck down memory at a silly rate, they crash often, and most of these web "apps" use poorly coded plugins to make them work properly.
What makes it worse, is the big-name vendors jumping on the bandwagon. For e.g. recently we upgraded our vSphere environment to ESXi 5.5, which forces you to use the web app to manage the fucking thing. To say its horrid, and unfit for purpose is being nice. It actually relies entirely on Flash! What annoys me is that they had a perfectly good, respected, and fully functioning native app, which is STILL miles better.
This story rings true for many others - Solarwinds is another big one - we went from an awesome native app, to a horrible mess of a web version, and they completely pulled support for the functioning and nice to use native jobby.
The thing is everyone and his dog is doing it (switching to web browsers for their apps). What am I missing? When did native apps become so unloved by vendors? Is the cost saving THAT big? If so, WHY!?
Where do you lot sit on this one?