You mean web apps? Because the web itself was fine till everyone started thinking that anything on the web must be an application. And that web must "win" mobile for some reason.

You'll understand that "some reason" when you'll want some cool, fancy, useful app and the vendor will have not developed a version for your current mobile OS.

Few of web apps are useful, though, and all suffer severe performance and UX penalty by the very virtue of being run within a browser.

Few of any kind of apps are useful.

The non-purists (which is most people) have decided that availability trumps everything.

I was more of a purist, myself, but after some bad experiences with the lack of native apps, I'm more of a realist these days.

Web apps have been the default approach for over a decade now. The O.G. vision of the web / netscape was to have a virtual OS, platform independent. I think it's time to lay the idea of the webapp as somehow being this alien thing to rest...

The web is a broken and incomplete adaption of Xanadu.

Xanadu is a broken and incomplete implementation of Xanadu, and has been for more than my entire lifespan (child of the 60s baby!).

Which is not enough reason to prefer an implementation which dropped Xanadu's probably most important feature (two-side links) from the beginning.

I blame the person from Porlock.