This is a good point. I'm not opposed to using HTML in an app. Back in the early 00's, I did a decent bit of tweaking my Adium conversation display style. It's useful for displaying that kind of content easily.
But there's a difference between saying "I put a webview in my app" and "I put my whole app in a webview". Driving the whole thing from HTML/JS tends to have bad implications for:
• Performance (laggy animation, excessive CPU use, more drain on battery)
• Window management (everything in one box! Modal overlays! Window management is overrated, nobody uses Exposé or multiple windows of one app anyway)
• and UI consistency (some popup menus look one way, right click and every other popup menu on the computer looks another way)
Adium, Textual, and Colloquy use HTML to display things, but they don't try and shove the whole damn app in it.
They're only single-windowed apps because they choose to be. Colloquy and Adium both let you pull channels/servers out into multiple windows (just like tabs in a browser).
Slack actually does use multiple windows. The sign-in flow (enter organization, enter email address, choose between magic-email or password authentication, enter password) happens in a popup.
What it can't do is pull organizations out into separate windows like Adium or Colloquy. I'm in 3 separate groups on Slack, and sometimes in a conversation in more than one of them simultaneously.
And yeah, I can go open up the second one in my web browser, but it kind of defeats the point of having a "native app" if it's going to be crappier than just going to the website.
But there's a difference between saying "I put a webview in my app" and "I put my whole app in a webview". Driving the whole thing from HTML/JS tends to have bad implications for:
• Performance (laggy animation, excessive CPU use, more drain on battery)
• Window management (everything in one box! Modal overlays! Window management is overrated, nobody uses Exposé or multiple windows of one app anyway)
• and UI consistency (some popup menus look one way, right click and every other popup menu on the computer looks another way)
Adium, Textual, and Colloquy use HTML to display things, but they don't try and shove the whole damn app in it.