> The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.
It's wild how much easier it is to build things that harness web technology these days. I'm building features on top of three.js and offline storage and SSE and WebAudio and WebAssembly multiple times per week these days. I used to tinker with some of those maybe once or twice a year.
I 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.
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.
Do you actually use 100 different apps in the browser? The web is nice for loading websites, obviously you shouldn't have to install one app per website. But anything more complex than a website should be a program you install.
> hostile to the idea of installing an application
When you load a webapp, you download and run it. It's actually pretty similar to "installing and deleting right after use". If I look at mobile phones, people most definitely install apps they care about. Nobody would use whatsapp from the browser on their phone, or Instagram, or TikTok, would they?
> isn't economical
Oh yeah, I agree that the cheap option is to have a webapp. Usually it's not even done well: I often have to run Chrome because the cheap webapp doesn't work on Firefox. Next step to get cheaper: vibe-coded webapps. We're getting there, but it does not make it desirable!
> Google also doesn't own the web contrary to popular belief (Even if they have an outsized amount of influence).
Are you really trying to say that "the web" is not "the property" of Google? I mean, I agree, but... do you actually believe that this is what I meant?
> Do you actually use 100 different apps in the browser?
Yes. My tab count regularly exceeds 100.
> If I look at mobile phones, people most definitely install apps they care about. Nobody would use whatsapp from the browser on their phone, or Instagram, or TikTok, would they?
You're confusing volume of applications with time spent on applications. These users have 2-3 tasks they're willing to download and install an app for, but chances are you will never develop an app billions of users will have open for most of the day, and most users don't want to download an app to do things outside of Instagram, TikTok etc.
> Oh yeah, I agree that the cheap option is to have a webapp. Usually it's not even done well: I often have to run Chrome because the cheap webapp doesn't work on Firefox. Next step to get cheaper: vibe-coded webapps. We're getting there, but it does not make it desirable!
Invisible hand of the free market tends to take care of that. And I say that as someone who leans liberal progressive when it comes to economic policies. I doubt the 1.0 versions of many "hand-crafted" apps would hold up to today's standards either.
I really don't understand how some people think it's possible to craft a "perfect" version 1.0 of anything and then release it out into the wild with 0 problems. This was an issue BEFORE vibe coding. Does anyone here remember the first release of Cyberpunk 2077? Software doesn't magically improve by itself, it has to run into real world friction and feedback from users to get anywhere. Even if that feedback is just "this app is vibe-coded slop".
> Are you really trying to say that "the web" is not "the property" of Google? I mean, I agree, but... do you actually believe that this is what I meant?
Yes. "Chaos is a ladder". Instead of bemoaning the state of the internet, it's more productive to find opportunities in the current chaos.
What do you call a webapp? To me, Gmail is a webapp. Google Docs is a webapp. A video game running in the browser is a webapp. Outlook running in the browser is a webapp. Google Meet is a webapp.
HN is NOT a webapp. Google Search is NOT a webapp. A blog is NOT a webapp. Those are "websites" (again, my wording for clarity).
My stance is that the web is great for websites, not for webapps. Apps should run on the OS, not in the browser.
> most users don't want to download an app to do things outside of Instagram, TikTok etc.
But again, what do they do outside of Instagram, TikTok, etc? Almost nothing, right? And most of that nothing is probably done on websites, not webapps.
Sure, they don't want to install an app to order something on Temu/Zalando. But those should be websites anyway.
> Invisible hand of the free market tends to take care of that.
Invisible hand doesn't work in a market ruled by quasi monopolies.
> I really don't understand how some people think it's possible to craft a "perfect" version 1.0 of anything and then release it out into the wild with 0 problems.
In good approximation, nobody thinks that. That's why you can update software. Which is done in webapps in a way, though brute-force style: instead of updating the webapp when it changes, you re-download it every time.
> Instead of bemoaning the state of the internet, it's more productive to find opportunities in the current chaos.
My point is: "don't write webapps, write native apps". There are plenty of opportunities there.
> the multiplayer-over-audio thing is a first for an RTS as far as I can tell
Because it's fun, but that's all it is. I had a class at university decades ago where the goal was to transmit data between two computers over audio (and the sound was unpleasant). It's not a novel idea, it's just not something that should be done other than for learning or fun.
For anyone having a hard time following the comments or mentality: Someone explained in a HN comment a few weeks ago in a comment which has helped clarify in my mind: Web (And especially SAAS) developers make up a large portion of HN users. They use and love frontend frameworks, Node, NPM, and using web tech for many tasks, as a first line of tools.
- Signal (not a web app, for good reason, though frankly I'd be thrilled if it lived in a browser tab anyway as an app being served to localhost)
- The occasional PDF viewer for PDFs I'm working on (anything loaded from the web gets viewed in the in-browser PDF viewer, but when I'm creating presentations or papers or similar, I have a terminal and a PDF viewer both half-maximized)
It does seem that more and more browser features have become stable but that has been sort of drowned out by the AI boom. Even with millions of us monkeys on these keyboards, (now monkey simulators?), I still think there are even more discoveries to be found in web dev. You can get so much functionality with even the most basic hardware.
25 years ago well over 95% of users would have been on windows, and there is no chance in hell you'll ever convince me that modern web development is as easy as Visual Basic was for whipping up UIs back in the day.
That AI is making it easier is happenstance, it makes generating UIs in anything easier.
But unlike the year of the Linux desktop (any year now!), the promise of the Web as the app platform of the future seems to recede ever further into the distance.
The web is the app platform of today. Many, many things that would have been local applications are now web apps. Document editing, email, chat, collaboration...
I'm hoping that more native apps get rewritten as web apps so they can stay in a browser sandbox where they belong. "Fortunately", we'll probably both get all the slop we "want".
Yeah I find it interesting that HN's love of performance seems to overpower their love of security. Especially since nearly everyone here has better hardware than average people.
I do not enjoy running random strangers' Rust on my machine unless it's sitting in a VM and probably also a container, at which point the performance benefit is gone anyways.
I recently moved all of the desktop apps I reasonably could to browser tabs and have been quite happy with it.
Oh and don't forget how easily you can modify the source. With a simple user script or extension I can modify your website to behave exactly how I want it to without recompiling.
It's largely because when Electron first came out the browser app platform (the API availability, performance, etc) was still quite thin and Electron was quite slow. HN just got stuck in this echo that web browsers are very inefficient and have no benefits while native apps are so much better. Java had the same echo for a long time on nerd forums because the JVM was a lot slower than native compiled apps for the first few years of its development.
In practice since then, browser-based apps ended up eating a lot of the demand for native apps and the web browser as a platform ended up displacing a lot of native apps, but the echo has stayed around here with little grounding. As such the distribution, security, and performance posture for browser and mobile apps has become a lot better while native app toolkits have lagged behind.
There's certainly a possibility that agentic development will make native development "cheap" again and encourage a lot more of it. But the web platform's security posture is much more well fleshed out at this point so I'm not sure.
Electron also papered over the problem that browsers weren't evergreen, so if you ran in the user's browser, you might not have support for current web APIs you want to depend on.
Most browsers are evergreen and updated frequently now, to the point that that no longer seems like an issue.
Linux has been smashing records on the steam hardware survey for months now. People I knew who refused to touch anything else but windows are now using framework laptops with Mint or Ubuntu. 2026 absolutely has been the year of the Linux desktop.
WebGPU sucks compared to the desktop APIs. JavaScript and wasm suck compared to native code. Not being able to have threads for loading things like assets in the background sucks.
Yeah there's a ton of llm slop web games out there but anything serious is going to be a desktop application
You can send handles to workers that can do threaded background loading, I believe.
It's sad we got such intensification of react as a jQuery++, such massive focus on munging html. But we really have made few gains building actual full stack front end architectures, about understanding deeply how to get work off the main thread, how to run js well. And there so much platform there we could be using!
Hurts a lot that workers have had absolutely pitiful ESM support. Still no import maps, and I'd place very high odds this baked nonsense stays just as shitfest when 2030 rolls around. That massively inhibits doing the right thing, makes it massively shittier to use the platform, alas. But it's doable. Bundle bundle bundle. Blah.
The web is a pile of garbage fronted by horrible software in the form of terrible browsers that is under massive, unceasing attack from AI bots that will render the entirety of it unusable over time.
I agree that it’s a pile of garbage. Essentially a set of languages and protocols commandeered by corporations for their own benefit and also held back by those same corporations so they have a moat. We’ve gathered around human slop like Javascript and stuck with it “just because”.
I like this statement:
> The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.
It's wild how much easier it is to build things that harness web technology these days. I'm building features on top of three.js and offline storage and SSE and WebAudio and WebAssembly multiple times per week these days. I used to tinker with some of those maybe once or twice a year.
> I’m building
You mean the LLM is?
Reminds me of the “you made this? … I made this” meme.
I 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.
> than 100 different apps
Do you actually use 100 different apps in the browser? The web is nice for loading websites, obviously you shouldn't have to install one app per website. But anything more complex than a website should be a program you install.
> hostile to the idea of installing an application
When you load a webapp, you download and run it. It's actually pretty similar to "installing and deleting right after use". If I look at mobile phones, people most definitely install apps they care about. Nobody would use whatsapp from the browser on their phone, or Instagram, or TikTok, would they?
> isn't economical
Oh yeah, I agree that the cheap option is to have a webapp. Usually it's not even done well: I often have to run Chrome because the cheap webapp doesn't work on Firefox. Next step to get cheaper: vibe-coded webapps. We're getting there, but it does not make it desirable!
> Google also doesn't own the web contrary to popular belief (Even if they have an outsized amount of influence).
Are you really trying to say that "the web" is not "the property" of Google? I mean, I agree, but... do you actually believe that this is what I meant?
> Do you actually use 100 different apps in the browser?
Yes. My tab count regularly exceeds 100.
> If I look at mobile phones, people most definitely install apps they care about. Nobody would use whatsapp from the browser on their phone, or Instagram, or TikTok, would they?
You're confusing volume of applications with time spent on applications. These users have 2-3 tasks they're willing to download and install an app for, but chances are you will never develop an app billions of users will have open for most of the day, and most users don't want to download an app to do things outside of Instagram, TikTok etc.
> Oh yeah, I agree that the cheap option is to have a webapp. Usually it's not even done well: I often have to run Chrome because the cheap webapp doesn't work on Firefox. Next step to get cheaper: vibe-coded webapps. We're getting there, but it does not make it desirable!
Invisible hand of the free market tends to take care of that. And I say that as someone who leans liberal progressive when it comes to economic policies. I doubt the 1.0 versions of many "hand-crafted" apps would hold up to today's standards either.
I really don't understand how some people think it's possible to craft a "perfect" version 1.0 of anything and then release it out into the wild with 0 problems. This was an issue BEFORE vibe coding. Does anyone here remember the first release of Cyberpunk 2077? Software doesn't magically improve by itself, it has to run into real world friction and feedback from users to get anywhere. Even if that feedback is just "this app is vibe-coded slop".
> Are you really trying to say that "the web" is not "the property" of Google? I mean, I agree, but... do you actually believe that this is what I meant?
Yes. "Chaos is a ladder". Instead of bemoaning the state of the internet, it's more productive to find opportunities in the current chaos.
> Yes. My tab count regularly exceeds 100.
What do you call a webapp? To me, Gmail is a webapp. Google Docs is a webapp. A video game running in the browser is a webapp. Outlook running in the browser is a webapp. Google Meet is a webapp.
HN is NOT a webapp. Google Search is NOT a webapp. A blog is NOT a webapp. Those are "websites" (again, my wording for clarity).
My stance is that the web is great for websites, not for webapps. Apps should run on the OS, not in the browser.
> most users don't want to download an app to do things outside of Instagram, TikTok etc.
But again, what do they do outside of Instagram, TikTok, etc? Almost nothing, right? And most of that nothing is probably done on websites, not webapps.
Sure, they don't want to install an app to order something on Temu/Zalando. But those should be websites anyway.
> Invisible hand of the free market tends to take care of that.
Invisible hand doesn't work in a market ruled by quasi monopolies.
> I really don't understand how some people think it's possible to craft a "perfect" version 1.0 of anything and then release it out into the wild with 0 problems.
In good approximation, nobody thinks that. That's why you can update software. Which is done in webapps in a way, though brute-force style: instead of updating the webapp when it changes, you re-download it every time.
> Instead of bemoaning the state of the internet, it's more productive to find opportunities in the current chaos.
My point is: "don't write webapps, write native apps". There are plenty of opportunities there.
> the multiplayer-over-audio thing is a first for an RTS as far as I can tell
Because it's fun, but that's all it is. I had a class at university decades ago where the goal was to transmit data between two computers over audio (and the sound was unpleasant). It's not a novel idea, it's just not something that should be done other than for learning or fun.
For anyone having a hard time following the comments or mentality: Someone explained in a HN comment a few weeks ago in a comment which has helped clarify in my mind: Web (And especially SAAS) developers make up a large portion of HN users. They use and love frontend frameworks, Node, NPM, and using web tech for many tasks, as a first line of tools.
I run roughly six applications regularly:
- One browser window (with tabs)
- One terminal window (with tabs)
- Signal (not a web app, for good reason, though frankly I'd be thrilled if it lived in a browser tab anyway as an app being served to localhost)
- The occasional PDF viewer for PDFs I'm working on (anything loaded from the web gets viewed in the in-browser PDF viewer, but when I'm creating presentations or papers or similar, I have a terminal and a PDF viewer both half-maximized)
- Video player for local videos (mpv)
- Music player for local music (quodlibet)
It does seem that more and more browser features have become stable but that has been sort of drowned out by the AI boom. Even with millions of us monkeys on these keyboards, (now monkey simulators?), I still think there are even more discoveries to be found in web dev. You can get so much functionality with even the most basic hardware.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50398631
25 years ago well over 95% of users would have been on windows, and there is no chance in hell you'll ever convince me that modern web development is as easy as Visual Basic was for whipping up UIs back in the day.
That AI is making it easier is happenstance, it makes generating UIs in anything easier.
But unlike the year of the Linux desktop (any year now!), the promise of the Web as the app platform of the future seems to recede ever further into the distance.
The web is the app platform of today. Many, many things that would have been local applications are now web apps. Document editing, email, chat, collaboration...
I’m hoping that great AI means we get back to native apps and leave the web house of cards behind.
I'm hoping that more native apps get rewritten as web apps so they can stay in a browser sandbox where they belong. "Fortunately", we'll probably both get all the slop we "want".
Yeah I find it interesting that HN's love of performance seems to overpower their love of security. Especially since nearly everyone here has better hardware than average people.
I do not enjoy running random strangers' Rust on my machine unless it's sitting in a VM and probably also a container, at which point the performance benefit is gone anyways.
I recently moved all of the desktop apps I reasonably could to browser tabs and have been quite happy with it.
Oh and don't forget how easily you can modify the source. With a simple user script or extension I can modify your website to behave exactly how I want it to without recompiling.
It's largely because when Electron first came out the browser app platform (the API availability, performance, etc) was still quite thin and Electron was quite slow. HN just got stuck in this echo that web browsers are very inefficient and have no benefits while native apps are so much better. Java had the same echo for a long time on nerd forums because the JVM was a lot slower than native compiled apps for the first few years of its development.
In practice since then, browser-based apps ended up eating a lot of the demand for native apps and the web browser as a platform ended up displacing a lot of native apps, but the echo has stayed around here with little grounding. As such the distribution, security, and performance posture for browser and mobile apps has become a lot better while native app toolkits have lagged behind.
There's certainly a possibility that agentic development will make native development "cheap" again and encourage a lot more of it. But the web platform's security posture is much more well fleshed out at this point so I'm not sure.
Electron also papered over the problem that browsers weren't evergreen, so if you ran in the user's browser, you might not have support for current web APIs you want to depend on.
Most browsers are evergreen and updated frequently now, to the point that that no longer seems like an issue.
There's players like apple making PWAs not have all the features they should, though
Linux has been smashing records on the steam hardware survey for months now. People I knew who refused to touch anything else but windows are now using framework laptops with Mint or Ubuntu. 2026 absolutely has been the year of the Linux desktop.
> for software people, being perpetually devalued is pretty novel
Hadn't really realized this is happening. Is it? Actually my experience right now is the exact opposite.
WebGPU sucks compared to the desktop APIs. JavaScript and wasm suck compared to native code. Not being able to have threads for loading things like assets in the background sucks.
Yeah there's a ton of llm slop web games out there but anything serious is going to be a desktop application
You can send handles to workers that can do threaded background loading, I believe.
It's sad we got such intensification of react as a jQuery++, such massive focus on munging html. But we really have made few gains building actual full stack front end architectures, about understanding deeply how to get work off the main thread, how to run js well. And there so much platform there we could be using!
Hurts a lot that workers have had absolutely pitiful ESM support. Still no import maps, and I'd place very high odds this baked nonsense stays just as shitfest when 2030 rolls around. That massively inhibits doing the right thing, makes it massively shittier to use the platform, alas. But it's doable. Bundle bundle bundle. Blah.
Crazy to say when desktop apps and TUIs are becoming more useful than ever. No the web is not enough, even for something as simple as version control.
We're probably further away now from "web is enough" than we were 5 years ago.
What if I told you not everyone is a developer?
And your point being?
The web and people developing for it still have a long way to go before it's enough for me.
Also if you read the article, the topic is discussed entirely within the context of software development and distribution.
The web is a pile of garbage fronted by horrible software in the form of terrible browsers that is under massive, unceasing attack from AI bots that will render the entirety of it unusable over time.
It will be shutoff. And i wont miss it.
What will you use instead?
PC software, embedded firmware, drivers, websites, etc. Right tool for the right job.
Native apps!
If Big Platform lets you.
Not sure what you mean.
gemini
gopher obviously.
On the contrary. In a world of spyware stacks controlled by oligarchic corporations, the web is more indispensable than ever.
I agree that it’s a pile of garbage. Essentially a set of languages and protocols commandeered by corporations for their own benefit and also held back by those same corporations so they have a moat. We’ve gathered around human slop like Javascript and stuck with it “just because”.
Nevertheless here you are.
And yet I bet you would have a hard time spending a day without it. Obviously interacting to this comment would also use the Web.