Free yourself from the notion that a web browser purely browses The Web.
It's nowadays also a cross-platform insta-deployment GUI application runtime environment with mostly bad native OS integration and performance characteristics (both ~improving, there's even native filesystem access now).
> Free yourself from the notion that a web browser purely browses The Web.
Free yourself from the notion that a web browser should do anything more than browsing the web. native applications have existed for decades, no reason to bloat the scope of a browser.
Hmm, RGamma describes reality: it is a fact that web browsers don't purely browse The Web, has been for decades now, and there is zero indication this is going to change.
You seem to demand that people ignore this reality, because you don't like it. This is not helpful.
I don't like this reality either, but despite that I find your statement also factually incorrect: "native applications have existed for decades, no reason to bloat the scope of a browser".
Of course there are reasons, otherwise people/companies won't do it, and users won't use bloated browser that give them no benefits.
I agree that downsides outweigh the upsides, but the upsides are obvious and immediate while the downsides are long-term and mostly subtle...
> Of course there are reasons, otherwise people/companies won't do it, and users won't use bloated browser that give them no benefits.
The reason is of course control. Things running in the browser gives Google control. That's why they push for everything running there. Want to compete with Google? Tough luck, no tracking for you while they give themselves IDs built into the browser. Do something Google doesn't like? Maybe your site isn't "safe" enough according to Google and won't be shown to users. Invested in your webapp but want to integrate something novel? Guess who gets to decide if you can?
One big reason is that installing the software is one click (on the link) and it works every time. With native software, on phones you have to open the App Store, search for an app and usually wait to download hundreds of megabytes before anything happens. On personal computers it's much worse.
Seeing a semi-technical acquaintance use in-browser software for daily productive work hurts my programmer's soul. It's alright for some light things, like vacation planning, but remote desktop or an IDE...
Then there's that other scourge of Electron-like apps with gigantic memory budgets and all. I have resigned to throwing more hardware at it when I can't guarantee a lighter replacement (i.e. in a work setting):
All my productive systems have 32GB RAM and 8+ threads now and with browser, Teams, Outlook, IDE and dev containers the air's getting thin again :/
I think I would rather have a bloated (but reasonably fast and featureful) browser, than clog my computer with native apps for every app out there. Most of the apps doesnt need much power anyway.
I really dont want to see a repeat of phone apps for every company I interact with.
Most "apps" including "webapps" shouldn't be interactive programs to begin with but a web of documents you can explore using a tool made to your specifications and noone elses.
It's nowadays also a cross-platform insta-deployment GUI application runtime environment with mostly bad native OS integration and performance characteristics (both ~improving, there's even native filesystem access now).
In any case it's Good Enough (C), so it sticks.