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Comment by snlacks | Hacker News Reader

No one's delivered? There were and are plenty of platforms for full apps on the web. All of them require: loading each time or elevated privileges above the normal browser. This is not the reason they haven't taken off. Security isn't the reason either.

It isn't used because it's just not how the suppliers of content nor consumers of the web want to use the web.

If they want a full featured app, they use it. Even with super fast speeds, latency and minimal startup time still make the browser unattractive for this.

Web users and content providers want linkable documents.

I'd argue that the modern browser stack is so good that we see installed apps adopting html/css/js for the presentation layer.

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IMHO the word "installed app" shouldn't even exist. What's the use of "installing" an application these days?

Of course this goes hand in hand with an instant start (no dreaded splash screens please), and not having to download gigabytes upon gigabytes of data upfront.

Modern web apps might be bad at this, and browser engines might be bloated, but native apps aren't any better (even heavy web pages still load many times faster than - for instance - starting Visual Studio or Photoshop).

What's the issue? There's two that are unavoidable.

The maximum speed of moving data from one physical place to another, moving data from the hard drive to the motherboard and the ram to the cpu/cache is faster than from the internet to a computer. To he speed of light is still noticably slow when you're making round trips to get data.

The other issue is configuration, even if automated, software needs to make decisions about how to deal with different hardware and system differences. This takes time to bootstrap after initial load increase time to usuability or it can be done on the fly slowing down the interactions.

> What's the use of "installing" an application these days?

Once I "install" an application, for example libreoffice:

- It works even if I do not have a working Internet connection (or back in the day, even if I had removed the original media from the drive);

- It works even if the original is gone.

That is, by "installing" an application, I gain a permanent, offline, working copy of it.

Most of this isn't a given anymore with software vendors going subscription-only like Adobe's Creative Cloud.

On the other hand, PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) also work in offline mode without a "traditional" installation step.

Which is a problem that needs to be pushed back against. SaaS is a step backwards in our relationship with our machines.

Progressive Web Apps that work in offline mode are still installed when first accessed through the browser; they just don't need to go through the "traditional" method (installer, app store).

"Traditional" applications that are subscription-only are only partially installed, if their full functionality requires always-on connectivity.

Not even Steam works like that.

Stay offline for 30 days (iirc) and try to play the games you paid for.

Well, Steam is a DRMed game lending platform; content is only stored off-line because there's no practical way for them to do otherwise. If they could get away with streaming games from their servers, they'd happily do it.

There are many things one could blame Steam for, but AFAIK this limitation has been removed years ago.

> Most of this isn't a given anymore with software vendors going subscription-only like Adobe's Creative Cloud.

Please stop saying this as if it is in any way acceptable. Some parts of the computing world work like this, but this is not, nor should it ever be, the new normal.

You can still definitely use your computer without resorting to such licensed crapware.

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