i find it ridiculously uncompelling. it's always felt not like a well formed grounded way to be. it's amazing that we have really good capable platforms that can help us. especially when there are orgs like w3c and what and lately wicg that serve as stewarts, that watch over these platforms. when there are often ietf tie ins. when there are projects like interop that help move the platform forward across browsers, agree on the baseline.
what's so viciously deeply libertarian coded to me about this assessment is it's me me me me me. what can i do? what can i make? what software can i build? with some notes of fear to tell you google is bad. beware google. i realize the anti-google sentiment is super strong in the world, but after being around the web for decades i can hardly say what thanks and joy and celebration i have to google for building the ultimate existential hedge against everyone else: a free platform for the free world that runs free on endless devices, that is the only free platform the world has ever seen with any success. that has gotten vastly better.
i think at this point and for half a decade plus on HN the "I know it tends to be an unpopular opinion" is thanks for the web and google. i think i'm in the minority for my thanks. i think the outrage and dismisal and scare words is by far the most popular stance.
but what's on the other hand? native apps, on native platforms? those things that run on 20% of computers, that you have to be a licensed paid up authorized developer to ship to, that have very long queues for submitting your app to to maybe some day have it approved perhaps?
the libertarian view is what you can do. yeah, the super small, the do it yourself. it's a fantasy.
the mature societal view is what we can do. it's having this permissionless platform that anyone can build software for. it's having Project Fugu trying to make that platform competitive, good, capable: giving hte native platform a constant run for the money. so that we all can benefit. so that any dev can make an app. it's "extensible web manifesto", where the web doesn't bake in particular flavors of software development, so we can choose jquery or backbone or react or vue or solid or svelte or lit, so society can iterate and keep refining and re-deciding what surface they want to program to, what models fit them, what they want to program against: you don't see that with native platforms! you get what they are and that's mostly that!
you get such a wide ranging low level platform, such freedom to use it as you please on the web. but much much much more, everyone else can enjoy it too. it's a civilized platform, the only civilized one where we have control, where we the world has say. if you don't like the native platforms, well, you can remake something else, but it'll be you and your couple friends perhaps amid the 7b people who are still using either the web or what big companies gave them.
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?
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.