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Comment by ginkgotree | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't agree more. It honestly still seems nuts to me that the browser hasn't taken over the whole OS experience. It's clear that locally installed software is going away. But it's happening on a system that was designed decades ago to request a single markup document, and return it in a single response.

Obviously, the browser has matured. JavaScript has matured. We now have more protocols to work with than just HTTP (SDP for which WebRTC, perfect example. WebSockets). But in my mind the Chromebook is the first step in what is going to become all of personal computing.

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Locally installed software is, if anything, more prevalent than ever before.

Let's put aside mobile for a minute that so changed the landscape towards locally installed that it put Google's revenue model on its heels.

You see WhatsApp, Slack, etc., releasing Electron apps just to try to appear locally installable. If there wasn't such a high demand for it, and people weren't clamoring for a stand-alone app instead of a browser tab, companies would never invest the time and money.

Right, but it could be a browser feature right?

The main issue (for example in OS X) is that everything gets subsumed by the browser process so things like Command+Tab don't work as well. There are, of course, also OS integration issues, but over time I think we'll get pretty far along on that front.

Who's clamoring for apps? AFAICT that's only the companies that want the apps because it lets them spy on their customers in more ways.

Any disk IO intensive application is going to run and/or scale very poorly as a webapp.

What client workload is actually disk intensive by nature?

> It's clear that locally installed software is going away

Where performance matters, locally installed software is NOT going away anytime soon. Oh, just take gaming, for example. Good luck making AAA games run in your browser.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/03/12/mozilla-and-epic-pr...

> In less than 12 months, optimizations have increased the performance of Web applications using asm.js from 40% to within 67% of native,

which is still about the current figure, per arewefastyet: http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29&view=breakdown&suite=asm...

Not going to cut it for AAA games. Most likely it can be improved significantly with enough work, especially with WebAssembly, but I'll wait until I see it.

Anyways, what does the end game look like here?

Only very small games can be downloaded every time you want to play. Most games have large resources that will need to be cached. But the cache will be large enough that you'll want to surface it to the user, and let them decide what to uninstall, especially on Chromebooks with their puny storage.

Plus games are something you want to be able to play offline.

So we just wind up with Steam, right?

>Plus games are something you want to be able to play offline

Offline webapps is a thing now. With things like Service Workers hopefully we'll see it more frequently.

Would totally cut it for the casual gamer who plays AAA games, though. Not every gamer who purchases the AAA titles is buying hardware to match them. Many times the question boils down to "is my current hardware good enough"?

Good luck writing anything that requires all the performance you can get, inside a browser.

Damn its refreshing to hear this.

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