Qt QML Is Better Than HTML5 For User Interfaces?

[Jabberwocky]

Not surprised. Really obvious especially on raspberry pi.

My personal preference is that all software I use must be written in Qt. This obviously is not close to practical for various reasons. I would much rather have software that "looks and feels" the same across many platforms and is very easy to port to different display servers for example, even if it's a little bit slower. I would not mind if most applications that comes with a desktop environment was written in HTML, things like network manager, virtual machine manager, disk partitioning. It might help people to collaborate more? Regardless of collaboration it would be useful to have the same calculator, calendar, etc on Windows, OS X and Linux just for the sake of getting used to one interface.

Cross-platform applications that I use a lot and enjoy:
Firefox (gtk UI composed in XUL and HTML5)
Telegram (Qt)
Teamspeak 3 (Qt)
Etcher (Electron)
Visual Studio Code (Electron)
VLC (Qt)

Cross-platform applications that I use but don't enjoy:
Gimp (gtk) - I've been using it for many years, it works great. I have never enjoyed it from UX point of view.
Slack (Electron) - Slow and Multiple organizations eats all more than 8GB RAM in my use cases.

Honorable mentions:
Battle.net (Qt) - OS X and Windows.
Radeon Settings (Qt) - Windows only.

I wonder if Ionic 2 will "produce" any popular apps in the future. It looks like it has potential.

Disclaimer: I have some web development experience, the closest to gtk/qt I have gotten was AWT/Swing back in school (it wasn't pretty).

Edit: Added VLC, Updated Firefox desc based on unixfan2001's comment.

[franglais125]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better...w_of_headlines

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

Exactly! Example:

Title: Where did Hitler hide?

Answer: No.

Ehh, oops.

[sarmad]

Qt QML Is Better Thank HTML5 For User Interfaces? Of course it is. As a developer who have worked with both I would say it's much easier to get your UI ideas implemented in QML than in HTML5. Not to mention that you generally get better performance/smoother UI with QML compared to HTML5.

[Razmattaz]

HTML5 is well known and used by millions of developers. The future of cross-platform application development is most likely HTML5 with CSS3 and JS. The biggest thing holding back HTML as a viable UI platform, is the overheads associated with running an app in a browser, and perhaps to a certain extent the churn in these web development frameworks, , so many libraries and frameworks. Maybe a leaner browser engine coupled with an electron-like framework, or separating the logic or business part of key applications in micro-services can improve the performance and reduce memory overheads of such applications.

[unixfan2001]

Firefox (gtk)

It's not really GTK in the traditional sense.
The UI is composed in XUL and HTML5.

[AndyChow]

To be honest world has gone crazy as people are creating desktop software as webapps... If world was sane this comparison would be stupid but now...

I used to agree with you, but now I've drunk the kool-aid. Webapps are server-centric, therefore client agnostic. It often makes a lot of sense to go back to a "terminal"-like model. The bandwidth is high, the latency is low, why should you run anything locally? This is what enables BYOD and let your employees use windows, mac, Gnu/Linux, BSD, whatever they want, and not have to worry.

Japan's FGCS is here, it's real. The sun shines, and feeds all plants.

[polarathene]

If I need to render a GPU-accelerated GUI with custom animations and actions anyway and I can't really achieve the kind of throughput and latency I want without direct access to the local filesystem, I'd certainly choose Qt Quick 2.0 over writing my own GUI framework in raw WebGL, OpenGL, or Vulkan.

IIRC quite alot of CSS is already GPU accelerated when appropriate, browsers also tend to render the content in tiles and layers. That aside I think there are some frameworks already tailored to using the GPU more if what you get by default isn't enough for you. For direct file system access, you can utilize Electron, it will provide you with a webview frontend and a node.js backend with desktop integrations. Drawback is the app size will be larger and most likely to use quite a bit of RAM. These two issues might change in future if a backend different from Node.JS was swapped out, Rust for example. along with the frontend being replaced with Servo and anything else needed to support it?

[doom_Oo7]

I am not surprised.
What I would like to see is Qt Quick Controls 2 which look native on the desktop.
Last time I checked they only had styles for the big 3 mobile platforms.

You can use this style to get the "desktop" look : https://github.com/KDE/qqc2-desktop-style

[doom_Oo7]

IIRC quite alot of CSS is already GPU accelerated when appropriate, browsers also tend to render the content in tiles and layers. That aside I think there are some frameworks already tailored to using the GPU more if what you get by default isn't enough for you. For direct file system access, you can utilize Electron, it will provide you with a webview frontend and a node.js backend with desktop integrations. Drawback is the app size will be larger and most likely to use quite a bit of RAM. These two issues might change in future if a backend different from Node.JS was swapped out, Rust for example. along with the frontend being replaced with Servo and anything else needed to support it?

Yet Qt apps are faster and most responsive. Handles 1080p 60fps smooth animations on *raspberry pi*'s, while even simple web pages are a laggy mess.

[polarathene]

Really web apps? They referring to Android apps you download from the play store and find out they are just web browsers? The app is identical to the website. What's the point.

That's not always the case. Hybrid apps can leverage OS integration much better, they have access to features of the system like regular apps, they can use GPU accelleration better than the browsers(but still have some limitations iirc),I think they avoid the issue of memory limits per browser tab.. I remember it being a big problem for some popular website UI trying to provide mobile support, they had to do a lot of hacks/workarounds to resolve it, later finding that a hybrid app would avoid the issue of using too much memory(small compared to native apps) that iOS would kill the browsser tab.