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This is a sentiment I do not understand.

Expressing a desire for open-source software:

> no need to support proprietary platforms and most importantly no need to be a slave to the Play store, App store or Microsoft store

While seemingly replacing it with closed-source web software. Spotify and Figma are listed, but presumably there's others too.

Here's the thing. These web apps are much worse from a freedom perspective than the client-side software they're replacing. You're less likely to be able to run them if the company doesn't want you too, e.g., they normally can't be run without having an account. But more importantly, with closed-source web software you've taken the one thing you actually did own, your data (which once lived on your hardware that you have full control over) and now you've given that to the company too. And you still don't have the source code.

In a freedom sense, this is absolutely the worst of all worlds. Slowly losing ownership of your data as we move to web apps is a path to a Kafkaesque nightmare where a tech company can arbitrarily cut off access to your life's work on a whim. This is already happening.

You can still get by only using apps that let you own your data today, but it becomes harder and harder every year. And at least in the tech community, a lot of this is driven by a mind-bogglingly paradoxical-on-its-face preference among open-source advocates for closed-source web apps over native apps (which are actually "freer" from a data ownership perspective).

Whether you have to log in or whether any data is stored locally isn't a technical distinction made by whether the client is implemented as a browser application or a native application. Your post is one big non sequitur.

Moving from streaming music from my Spotify Javascript client to streaming music from my native iTunes Swift app does nothing for me. I'd say it's actually worse because now my solution isn't cross-platform anymore and I've lost the browser chrome's dev tools like the network inspector.

A browser client puts much more control in the hands of the user. It's one of the last bastions of freedom that we have before all software in locked behind app stores and app approval processes.

The point seems to be that users usually don't control the servers. If the app is entirely local then users may have full control.

The fact that users don't usually control the servers with web apps is just a reflection of the fact that users don't usually control anything these days, and most user facing applications these days are implemented as web apps. The average user doesn't have control over their desktop apps either, those apps are dependent on Microsoft/Apple/Adobe servers and even if they aren't "helpfully" syncing everything to a cloud they're sending disturbing amounts of telemetry. As hombre_fatal points out, there's no intrinsic link between the freedom question and the technical question. Enough free software developers (understandably) just prefer a traditional desktop app/local storage design over an API/web client design that people get the impression that freedom respecting apps are always desktop apps. Partly because of that choice, free software is going to keep looking outdated and inconvenient to use while more people flock to SaaSS for the services' superior cross-platform and multi-device capabilities.

> The average user doesn't have control over their desktop apps either, ...

Right, that's why I mentioned "entirely local".

My native iTunes app supports hosting my entire music collection as MP3 files that I've bought from any number of services (or ripped myself) on my hard disk that I can simply copy to any other computer and it will play them just fine, in any application that supports that format. That's exactly what 100% data ownership looks like, rendering your claim that the post is "one big non sequitur" absolutely ridiculous.

I'd argue that most of the time you never owned your data, it was held under lock and key by proprietary serialization formats.

Sure it's physically on your disk, but data is only useful if you own the mechanisms to read and write it. If that software is proprietary you don't own the data.

Genuine question: how do you reconcile a desire for a “liver ecosystem” with backing Chromium/WebKit?

I never thought I’d be backing Apple, but at this point I’m hoping that safari remains independent of Google to provide some decentralization.

I absolutely see your point; in theory, a web of many engines and browsers would be awesome. In practice however, at least IMHO, Safari isn’t really a competitor to Chrome at this point, but rather a means of Apple to curb the web and to conform to it’s standards. Think WebP, WebM, WebA (or Ogg/Vorbis - no support for any free/libre codecs at all), PWAs, offline support, push notifications and the list goes on. A serious competitor like the Firefox from a few years ago would have been awesome, but Safari really just seems to push people away from the web platform, much like IE’s lack of support in the past has done. The alternative to a (kinda, but not really) monoculture web platform is IMHO preferable to a platform of fully proprietary native platforms.

Worth noting that WebP support was added to Safari 14 in Big Sur and iOS 14.

> Safari isn’t really a competitor to Chrome at this point, but rather a means of Apple to curb the web and to conform to it’s standards

You got this wrong. Currently it's Chrome that pushes its own standards at neck-breaking speed with utter disregard to any objections. For example, all of the standards that Mozilla considers harmful are enabled by default in Chrome. Or standards that both Safari and Mozilla consider woefully under-specced or badly implemented? Well, Chrome ships them to Google's own teams and then refuses to hide them back under a flag.

Apple may not give enough resources to Safari, that's true. But don't for a second assume that Apple is unequivocally bad and Google is unequivocally good when it comes to the web. I'll take Safari over Google any day of the week.

Native apps do just fine. Surely not many people will drop their fave browser for a few apps. Im writing this on FF mobile and I use FF on desktop.

Maybe we overrate the value of PWA features? I mean they're great and all but will not having them affect my workflow?

It's quite possible to use a Chrome/Edge/Brave PWA while still using FF for your regular browsing.

By itself no, but this is just one more thing on a list of complaints I have with firefox, including:

- Having to restart after package manager upgrades (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1492023)

- Issues with graphics when using Nvidia on linux

- Automatically opting in to using Cloudflare's DNS with DoH

- Several sites I've used that have reduced functionality on Firefox

- Absence of the ability to automatically open dev-tools on new tabs, or at least capture network requests as soon as a tab opens in the dev tools.

I really want Firefox to be a great browser, and I haven't given up on it yet, but it is getting harder to put up with things like this.

> - Issues with graphics when using Nvidia on linux

Stop buying nvidia graphics cards.

I don't understand why Firefox doesn't work for you? i use slack, spotify, figma on Firefox without missing anything. Lastly I don't really understand the monolithic argument in this discussion.

Pray tell, what's "st"? It's not googlable.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/St

It's a crappy terminal emulator that has poor support for everything and requires you compile plug-ins yourself to mitigate said poor support.

Some users feel this is good because it has little "bloat". It has pretty high latency[0] to show for it but saves 500 or so KiB on their hard drive[1].

0: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

1: https://youtu.be/4o_QuwkFTf8?t=1701

suckless terminal emulator - https://st.suckless.org/

Sounds like ChromeOS!