Where's our data, Google? Chrome 79 update 'a catastrophe' for Android devs with WebView apps:
A change to the location of profile data in Chrome 79 on Android, the new version rolling out now, means that applications using the WebView component lose data stored locally.
"This is a catastrophe; our users' data are being deleted as they receive the update," complained one developer.
[...] Google said it has halted the rollout, which is estimated at 50 per cent of devices.
The problem appears to stem from a change to the location of profile data in Chromium, the open source project on which Google Chrome is based. Some applications, such as those built with Apache Cordova, use the WebView component extensively, and in these cases the location of local data is determined by this component.
The upgrade to Chrome 79 should migrate this data to the new location, but a Chromium engineer remarked that "unfortunately local storage was missed off the list of files migrated."
[...] It gets worse. "There are several more missed migrations. 'databases' contains the websql dbs 'QuotaManager', and 'QuotaManager-journal' tracks site storage quotas," said another engineer.
One would think that after the deleting of user's files by a Microsoft Windows auto-update raised such a backlash, that testing for loss of data would be a top priority.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday December 18 2019, @06:56PM (9 children)
Maybe. The last time I checked into using Java the GUI interface was so poorly documented that I decided to use wxPython. And I've built Java GUIs before, though admittedly not in the last couple of decades.
Recently GUI interface tools seem to be going to hell. Qt want's you to use their automated screen builder, GTK is poorly documented. Fltk is poorly documented. Etc. Even with wx, the C++ version had bugs that made the screen unbuildable for undecipherable reasons. (Somebody had posted it as a bug a year ago, but I couldn't find a resolution.), where wxPython, which is built on the underlying same code, worked without problems.
My guess is that native code GUIs are being ignored and turned into craft secrets. Everybody is expected to use web interfaces, which is an extremely poor choice for my purposes.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:17PM (8 children)
Umm... have you use VSCode or Atom IDEs? They're local IDEs written in Javascript. VSCode in particular is gaining user share very rapidly. I've done a lot of Swing Dev before in the 90s.
Heck I've used at least 2 different internally created UI framework over Swing to allow rapid dev. They end up looking like HTML. One of them was called PDML (Panel definition Markup Language) where you layout your UI declaratively with hooks back into our Java code for UI events - guess what that's how the HTML DOM behaves.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:18AM (3 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday December 19 2019, @04:41AM (2 children)
It is easy to be an armchair critic. Perhaps you'd like to share better alternatives, I'd be more than happy to look at better alternatives - so please enlighten us.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 19 2019, @06:43PM (1 child)
Simple - anything except a web browser. How hard was that, given that we know that the more links in a chain, the weaker the chain, and the web browser is a really weak link.
It would probably have been easier to harden Flash, since it wasn't trying to be and do everything - until it too fell into the same trap.
The more features you have, the more formats you support, the more you're screwed, and the more hoops you have to jump through.
To get back to essentials, the first question is do we even need a GUI? Many/most applications don't.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday December 19 2019, @10:39PM
"Don't use this" isn't really an alternative. I sure hope you're not proposing Flash...
And yes, some problems don't need a GUI, but fact is there still is a need to for GUIs in some cases, hence a good UI dev platform.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday December 19 2019, @01:06AM (3 children)
Somehow I think you didn't understand my comment. Visual Studio is not something I would consider. ... Yeah, I did some GUIs with Visual Basic (actually MSAccess) back in the late 1990's. They worked. But that's not the environment I'm interested in anymore. Java at least is portable. And I don't consider looking like HTML a plus.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by arslan on Thursday December 19 2019, @04:27AM (2 children)
VSCode has nothing to do with Visual Studio. The only thing similar is it inherited the initials. It is also a desktop IDE like you get with eclipse/intellij, not a in browser thingie.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday December 19 2019, @04:41PM (1 child)
If that's true, you couldn't prove it from the search results I got. And it's not in the Debian system repository, so I'd need a good reason to trust it before trying it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday December 19 2019, @10:42PM
That comment does absolutely nothing to validate your claims it is Visual Studio... I'm just pointing out to you that it isn't Visual Studio. Trust what you want or don't, I don't care.