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Comment by 505050 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

Little ironic. For me, Safari on macOS has the best PWA experience.

It gets small things right, like:

- Links open in the default browser

- Smarter about when to open new windows vs overtaking current window

- New windows have access to the same cookies

Those last two were big things when I was using Proton apps as PWAs. For example, I would go to the Proton Docs PWA and it would launch a new Proton Docs window with cookies for the document.

It's a very different experience on iOS. Apple very intentionally made installing PWAs ("Add to Home Screen") horrible UX and locked some features behind it (Push API). You are almost forced into publishing on the App Store if you need push notifications for any reason. macOS Safari does not have the same restriction.

A lot of people agree with Apple on this one because most push notifications are spam. I would agree but your installed PWA still needs to request permission to send push notifications to the user, so requiring users to add websites to their home screen is not a permission gate.

Why does apple hide so many things behind share? Absolutely terrible UX

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.

Google Chrome allows web apps full access to your USB devices if they can trick you into accepting a permission prompt.

> Yeah I find it interesting that HN's love of performance seems to overpower their love of security

I don't think we should necessarily want to live in a world where the browser is the only way to achieve sandboxing. The various flavours of chroot jails are gradually gaining traction to sandbox native apps as well.

You make a good point - the sandbox of the browser is a genuine improvement. It's crazy to think that on some desktop OS's if you download and run a weather app, it probably has access to all the files and peripherals you do (camera, microphone, etc...). Apple is doing good work on this front with macOS as are Linux devs with Flatpak. Mobile operating systems do a good job of isolating apps too.

Windows though... seems to be stuck in the 90's.

I read that on Apple if you download and install a weather app, every week it'll ask you if you're sure you want that app to know your location.

There's no happy middle ground. You'll always have to be careful what you install.

I just want to express some appreciation for your very reasonable reply. Most of the time, "native app" versus "web app" seems to be one of the perennial arguments; it's refreshing to see someone give serious consideration to their position on that point.

Fuck no. Native apps are _invariably_ worse than well-designed webapps: no tabs, no bookmarks, no copy/paste, deep links are usually broken, no ability to open multiple apps side-by-side.

I don't think I know even a single exception outside the hardware-heavy games or AR/VR.

I've seen some bone-headed opinions on HN before but this may take the cake...

> no tabs

Brother what are you even talking about? Tabbed applications predate the WWW.

> no bookmarks

Bookmarks are not a part of web apps, they're part of your browser (Which get this: Is a native app!)

> no copy/paste

Again, what are you smoking? Try this if you're on Windows: Open the Start Menu, then type notepad. See that menu bar up at the top? Click where it says Edit. What do you think the copy and paste options there do?

> deep links are usually broken

Okay, I'll grant you this one, deep links generally aren't a thing on native apps. But a native app is a thing that runs locally on your computer. What the hell would you be linking to?

> no ability to open multiple apps side-by-side

Not only can you open apps side-by-side, you can actually open them on top of each other.

Just because you don't know how to use your computer doesn't mean this functionality doesn't exist.

> Brother what are you even talking about? Tabbed applications predate the WWW.

And most native apps don't have them, especially on mobile.

> Bookmarks are not a part of web apps, they're part of your browser (Which get this: Is a native app!)

And? Which native apps have bookmarks?

Perhaps Apple Maps? Nope. Photos? Nope.

> Again, what are you smoking? Try this if you're on Windows: Open the Start Menu, then type notepad. See that menu bar up at the top? Click where it says Edit. What do you think the copy and paste options there do?

Open the Notepad and copy the text from the menu bar.

> Not only can you open apps side-by-side, you can actually open them on top of each other.

Not with mobile apps. And not with apps like Music.

> Just because you don't know how to use your computer doesn't mean this functionality doesn't exist.

It's funny to hear stupid takes and then ask these stupid takers to show the examples on their phones. Go on, open your phone and try to view the mail in multiple tabs.

Trivial in browser.

How will AI make the Apple app store approve your app? That's the bottleneck with Apple, not the development.

Which is much to all of our detriment. Web apps can't hold a candle to native apps in the quality of the user experience they provide.

Preferences differ; I will take a web app every time, for a whole variety of reasons.

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.

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