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...
I don't think I know even a single exception outside the hardware-heavy games or AR/VR.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Most browsers are evergreen and updated frequently now, to the point that that no longer seems like an issue.
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.
Windows though... seems to be stuck in the 90's.
There's no happy middle ground. You'll always have to be careful what you install.
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.
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.