I have an LG WebOS television and it runs extremely smoothly. VS Code is an electron app and nobody complains about its performance.
Ultimately webOS didn't lose because it was web tech. It lost because Android and iOS already captured the market. Windows Phone was a .NET runtime with similar performance to Java, but it failed to capture the market even with billions in Microsoft subsidies.
> I have an LG WebOS television and it runs extremely smoothly.
To counter that anecdote, I have an LG WebOS television and it is constantly freezing, I frequently have to power cycle it just to launch Netflix, it automatically updates itself without my consent, and each update seems to make it slower, or break something. Simply navigating the menu is a pain because of how unresponsive and slow it is, and setting it up required me to agree to a bunch of privacy policies.
To be fair, I blame LG for that more than WebOS. I don't really know anything about WebOS and how it relates to web tech, but I do remember using it many years ago on an HP TouchPad tablet. That was a great tablet experience at the time; way better than anything Android had to offer (except for the larger catalog of apps)
WebOS is smooth but it’s also half-dead. Nobody uses it except LG, and I wonder how long even them will bother with it (I mean, to get an app in their marketplace you have to basically send in a slide deck with all sorts of bureaucracy, it looks like something a low-rent manager would come up with, they cannot be serious about long-term success). It effectively recommends not to use its local APIs, but rather consider the device as a dumb kiosk.
Half-dead is a huge stretch, it's one of the best and most popular TV OS's. It might be hard to develop for, but it has all the apps and features 99% of people want with an amazing cursor concept.
It’s actually not hard to develop for, in my experience. What is hard is having to deal with the commercial silliness - Developer Mode disappearing after a few days? A manual submission process for a very mediocre store? A “recommended” payment gateway? I’ve been holding out on investing serious time on it because I have PTSD from Nokia/Maemo and the parallels with the current webos are (sadly) stark.
People don't complain about VSCode because microsoft tried hard with optimizing performance. But see any discussion about Atom, its "predecessor", or Slack (at least the older version, that was really memory hungry).
Out of all the Smart TVs I've tried (Samsung, Sony, LG), webOS is probably the best in user experience. Naturally, more expensive TVs with better processors run smoother, but my budget UHD TV from LG with webOS 3.0 ran pretty great.
