I have mixed feelings about Raycast announcing their move from the native interface to one powered by web tech (this is the same thing that made Photoshop’s dialogs so bad), but their blog post announcing the change has at least a useful list of some details that separate good native apps from bad web ones.

I think it’s worth checking out that list and internalizing it even if you’re nowhere near that kind of a decision, because some of these are universal requirements for a better-feeling interface:

• No cursor: pointer on interactive controls. Desktop apps don’t do this. It’s small, but it immediately signals “this is a website.”
• No hover highlights on most controls. On macOS, buttons and list items don’t highlight on hover the way they do on the web.
• Settings open in a separate native window, not a modal or a side panel.
• Popovers and tooltips render as native windows, not as DOM elements inside the WebView. They can extend beyond the window bounds, just like native popovers do.
• On macOS Tahoe, we adopted Apple’s new Liquid Glass material so Raycast blends with the system’s updated visual language from day one.
• No flickering when views appear or transition. This is a common tell in web apps, and we did a lot of work to eliminate it.

There is more in the blog post, and a lot more still left unsaid. Let me add one that I see all the time: accidental text selection. Web makes all text selectable by default, regardless of whether it makes sense for that text to be selected. On top of that, text selection heuristics on complex layouts are not that great. That means that surprisingly often you will see half a text on the page being selected in response to an accidental click or drag.

Here’s an example from YouTube I just spotted, where dragging a sidebar selects everything inside it:

It’s all solvable via the use of event cancellation and user-select, but requires someone to think about it happening.

Yes, there are moments where GUIs allow you to select text for a reason…

…but it’s always been a tricky proposition given the scarcity of affordances. It might be better to employ a pretty common “copy to clipboard” pattern instead.