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Comment by rched | Hacker News Reader

I can understand why it might seem that way but it is actually evolving very quickly. Probably faster than any other time in history. There are a few things driving this evolution but I think the most important one is a desire to make the web a competitive platform for most types of software. This means lower level APIs, deeper integration with OS, and yes a large focus on performance. 3D graphics, offline support, push notifications, file system access, animation, Bluetooth, and more are all recent areas of focus for browsers.

Web browsers really are becoming similar to operating systems in scope.

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There are a small number of people pushing that, but where is the adoption, and is the web at large really inaccesible without it? One example, I see a lot of websites offering to send me push notifications, and I always click no. A browser could not implement that feature and I would not notice, in fact it would be an improvement in experience.

Some very large companies are investing heavily in making the web the go-to platform for app developers. Google being the most obvious.

Web push notifications are usually not an essential part of web app experiences and I agree they have done more harm than good so far. Some of these features enable types of apps that were just not possible on the web before. Things like 3D games where WebGL/WebGPU would be essential, text editors where they don't function without access to the file system, or a browser based video chat app that uses WebRTC.

As these features become available in most browsers their adoption will increase and any browser that doesn't support them will not be able to access web apps or pages that depend on them.

I think the unsatisfying reason why one should implement it is because it's a standard API now, and it is always better to implement standards.

What industry are you in that people aren't adopting web apps? At my work we use a ton of web-apps. Chrome-books offer nothing but web apps and they're doing pretty well these days.

OK, sure. My point is: how many of them hard-depend (no graceful failover) on APIs introduced in the last 5 years though? You could build a pretty good web app 5 years ago, and many people did. Has the fundamental abstraction changed that much? I'm extremely skeptical of the claim.

If somebody does depend on something obscure like javascript APIs for bluetooth [like someone in this thread cited], are they doing that as a desktop app with chromium embedded or are they a more traditional webpage? Does it completely fall over and explode if you don't have bluetooth support in the browser? That would be pretty unreasonable for most developers.

What I'm saying is there is a difference between the bleeding edge stuff or things that push boundaries and common practice. And if you are coding against that other stuff, you also need a fallback for if it doesn't work.

There are tons of changes under the hood that made webapps development easier in the past 5 years, and not all of them can be polyfilled. For example, ES6 Proxy is something an end user won't even notice it exist, but now used at fundamental level on many webapps. Developers that depend on it won't trade their productivity gain from using the new api with supporting browsers that has less than 1% marketshare.

That’s how you get articles from angry web developers that break things in your browser and call it “the new IE”.

That sounds awful haha.

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