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Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

The immediate benefit that I see with these types of things is: installation isn't needed.

I remember this being quite a good thing for the Harvard course CS50. You don't need to download an IDE, you can just open one up in the cloud.

Video editing falls in the same space, depending on one's tech savviness.

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> installation isn't needed

That is such a silly gimmick. Video editing is a pretty time intensive activity - if I'm spending hours on something might as well spend 5 minutes installing the app locally, right?

You have full local admin access, right? And a dedicated workstation that's powerful enough for the job?

I'm not in the target market for this, but I can absolutely see a class of people for whom this style works completely.

That is if you can install the app. Some people aren't tech savvy but quite internet savvy. That wouldn't be us :P But some older aunts and uncles that I know, definitely.

Would they pay for a subscription in order to do video editing in the browser though?

It's not a gimmick, it's just better user experience. Look at it through the lens of an average user rather than a power user ("power user" in the context of someone who is fluent with technical aspects of computers, not the domain).

I'm not arguing that the app itself has better video editing UX -- it may very well be that local apps win there. But for onboarding, no installation wins.

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