alt Hacker NewsI know it tends to be an unpopular opinion, but to me the Web is too much, really.
Many people (me included) like to complain about how systemd is trying to overtake everything, but browsers are a lot worse than that. Even if I can realistically choose my OS today, I have to run most apps in a browser. And the browser landscape is not that nice in terms of freedom: Google controls it through Chromium, Apple manages to force their users to use Webkit, and Firefox... is marginal.
More than that: I can realistically assemble my own OS, that is actually feasible. The one tricky component that I will need to integrate, though, is the browser. And the browser landscape, again, is totally controlled by BigTech.
Pushing for webapps is pushing to lock us into Chromium, controlled by Google. I don't see what's great in shipping a copy of Chromium embedded in a webapp and calling that a "desktop app".
I want control and diversity. The Web is far from there, and for some reason people love that.
Ladybird is another web browser in the works that is a completely separate engine from chromium and webkit.
https://ladybird.org/
Native apps have their place, but the average everyday user is becoming more and more hostile to the idea of installing an application and just using their existing web browser to accomplish the same task. I know I would rather use my limited SSD space for photos, games, and movies, than 100 different apps. Also supporting hundreds of different pieces of hardware isn't economical for most projects. The web solves both problems in that it gets your app into the hands of users immediately and you can delegate the responsibility of supporting various hardware to the browser vendors.
Google also doesn't own the web contrary to popular belief (Even if they have an outsized amount of influence). The web is an open standard, anyone could hack together their own browser if they wanted to with enough time and effort. That amount prior to the AI era was so large, only a shop like Google, Firefox, or Apple could put in the time and effort required to make one, and the amount of time of effort that requires is falling significantly day-by-day due to LLM generated code.