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Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

A modern browser is the most full-featured application platform that has ever existed in terms of what comes "in the box".

Except for an operating system, of course.

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I'm not even sure it's more full-featured than non-OS application platforms, like Java. Mostly what it has is a large install base.

I'm not sure that I could create/style a Java based application nearly as easily as HTML markup and CSS though.

That may be true, depending on how you look at it? JavaScript was the language that, as Eric Lippert put it, was designed to "make the monkey dance.[1]" HTML and CSS and JavaScript are all designed around this ethos of try to figure out what was meant and throw SOMETHING on the screen. It's very forgiving, and it's really easy to get up and running with it quick. I'm not sure that's the same as full-featured; it makes a lot of things more accessible than Java or .NET or Win32 or Cocoa. But it doesn't have the width of functionality they do (it is catching up, admittedly, but they're not required to stay static either) and it makes more complicated tasks more difficult, especially if you need them to be performant.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/221615/why-do...

I've had the opposite experience.

If you can be flexible enough with the definition of 'full-featured' to read as 'able to run/produce more', I would argue that 'the browser' – if it encompasses http, html, javascript, and css – is more full-featured than Java. And we wouldn't even need to argue that the former's install base towers over the latter's.

Most OSes don't have render/styling systems that come close to what a browser does at their core... you can do a lot, but those features you have to often work for, or use libraries on top of the OS. And if you consider UI toolkits on top of the OS separate from the OS that's another issue.

In the end it all runs on an operating system... so it technically falls short of that of course, but building a web-based app is generally easier than raw-coding an application from the OS level.

Is this some sort of elaborate troll?

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