The greatest threat to the web is those that want to turn it into an “app platform” instead of a hypermedia system. Sadly the battle has probably been lost.
On one hand, there's this consistent theme of web Luddism - a lament for the simplicity of when the web was for documents, rather than apps.
On the other hand, there's this rage against increasing control of distribution channels by tech giants like Apple. The whole point of the web as app platform is to circumvent that.
You can think centralized distribution is a problem and still think the modern web is a bad solution to that problem.
A problem is that the web is being used for both applications and documents. I don't mind if an application I explicitly launched as an application asks to make Bluetooth connections, but I would mind if a blog post did that.
I think there's a lot of value in web applications, but I really don't like how it interferes with the non-application web.
There is an easy way of getting this experience today. Install NoScript (or some other extension so you can enable JS ondemand for certain websites) and everything is by default basically documents (well, forms, inputs and such will still be there). Then, when you encounter a application that needs JS, you simple enable it for that website.
Granted, I encounter many websites per week that simply won't render without JS, even non-interactive articles! Usually I just close them down unless the content is something I really, really want to read.
The security model for a desktop-installable 'app' is a superset of a webpage. Or at least it was in Firefox OS, where additional permissions were required for accessing the filesystem or hardware APIs. In this way they were not available to websites to hijack the in-browser sandbox; the system web browser was itself a 'browser app' with a restricted set of permissions.
(I presume it's similar in Chrome OS, while this blog post is in the context of 'appifying' Windows desktop outside the browser.)
If you mean security/privacy wise, then yeah I agree. But I don’t think it’s a “threat” in any other sense, eg it doesn’t mean every website is suddenly going to be using accelerometers and Bluetooth. It just means a subset of websites will have more features for browsers that support them.
Aside from the security/privacy issues, shouldn’t we be celebrating this as a liberation of functionality from walled garden app stores?
Pretty much the only "raw document" websites I ever visit are wikipedia, hn, and stack overflow.
The 'threat' is that people will use these features. And if the only thing that is keeping the 'old web' alive is that it simply wasn't possible to develop rich applications then it's already dead and probably never really existed in the first place.