The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford | Hacker News Reader

The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford

ftrain.com

58 pointsedward29 comments

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50398631

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.

> 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.

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...

There's players like apple making PWAs not have all the features they should, though

I’m hoping that great AI means we get back to native apps and leave the web house of cards behind.

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.

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.

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.

It will be shutoff. And i wont miss it.

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.

What will you use instead?

Native apps!

If Big Platform lets you.

gemini

gopher obviously.

Nevertheless here you are.

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”.

On the contrary. In a world of spyware stacks controlled by oligarchic corporations, the web is more indispensable than ever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com