We also need to protest against the ongoing effort to misuse the web for fscking web apps nobody wants, to the detriment of the original purpose of the web as a hypertext delivery mechanism.
You must be living in a parallel universe. On desktop pretty much the entire app industry as shifted to the web, including recently the very well-known and used software that are Office 365 and Photoshop. Most people are perfectly happy with web apps. Easily reachable and discoverable through web browsers, not using space in disk, performing quite well for most of them. They are great for companies too, reducing dramatically development and maintenance cost, with only one codebase for all devices instead of one per platform, allowing to develop apps that would have never existed otherwise.
Actually nobody cares about "the original purpose of the web". The web has included technologies to build apps very early by the way, back in the 90s.
I want some of them, if they make sense. I will give you that a lot of things just don't really make sense as a webapp, but a lot of other things do.
There is a lot of "small" things I'd rather run in the confines of a sandboxed webapp than run as a "native" app. Things I use once in every blue moon, where I do not want to download a binary or worse track down a bunch of dependencies and compile myself. Opening a website in <10seconds is just faster than that, and hassle-free, and doesn't mean I have to maintain the stuff (either by keeping it up to date, or remembering to get rid of the thing after use). Even worse are the webapps pretending to be "native apps". Please stop packaging your "webapp" only as an electron app if you only ever use normal web browser features.
My problem with the state of things is just that every other "small" webapp tries to compel me into making an account for absolutely no reason first, or sell me "premium" features, or is plastered full of ads (which is less of a problem with the adblocker I use). Worse, if they do not really let me export my data. But all this also applies to native apps these days.
> ...ongoing effort to misuse the web for fscking web apps nobody wants...
You mean things like google maps, gmail and vimeo? They seem pretty popular to me, and significantly improved by the fact that almost anyone with a web browser can access them.
Yeah, you’re right. No one ever wanted to use Hotmail on the web back in the 90s. No one wants to use Google Maps now. Please, please god let me have to download a native app from an App Store in order to access my online banking! It’s what the masses demand!
I want webapps. I don't want to install everything and the browser sandbox is tightest available. Taking my apps everywhere without having to install them is really nice.
Probably hard to unring that bell. It even seems like many "native apps" are now mostly just webviews with a very small amount of native orchestration, etc.
