alt Hacker NewsHot take but I think the entire concept of a "web app" needs to die. My web browser does not need access to my GPU, OpenGL/Vulkan, USB, MIDI, HID, <insert whatever other weird invocation of Cthulhu that exists here>. All of those are things a native app needs, not a website. IMO if you need that kind of access and your instinct is to do it as a "web app" your doing it wrong. Same thing, I would argue, for things even like WebAudio or WebSpeech. At this point my web browser is so complicated that it might as well be a mini-OS of it's own.
Like, I think that the instinct to make everything a web app is what partially leads to things like what this article complains about. Well, besides laziness, of course.
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For many of these things we're not talking about a web app though. It's frequently just a form, disguised as something more. I agree that the browser should be stripped back, but none of those things prevent my banks website from allowing me to do a payment.
E.g. your fitness tracking app or your parking app, they don't need any of those features. They can work perfectly fine as simply forms, they aren't "apps".
I largely disagree. The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform. Thats text, images, videos, animations, interactivity, video calls, etc.
At the very least, I disagree about GPUs, OpenGL/Vulcan, and various audio and video related things.