I was so shocked when my family member told me wordle is a website and not an app. I never thought that the masses would go for something like that in the package of a website. It really gives me hope for the future.
Web assembly and WGPU are coming and when they do it will be the next paradigm after mobile apps. But in order to get to this new glorious paradigm it is necessary for people to be capable of recognizing the value of software even if it’s in the browser and of using it on the scale seen with wordle. It’s just as likely that people would turn their nose up to a browser based software and everything would remain stagnate. So I am glad.
No thanks.
No thanks.
Thanks to Hacker News¹, I recently came across Learn systemd by example². The site itself is hosted by Hetzner, a German hosting provider that take user privacy seriously³ and uses Cloudflare as a privacy-conscious CDN⁴. The only third-party resources it uses are Google fonts. Users of uMatrix⁵ or uBlock Origin⁶ can easily block these resources and the web app works perfectly fine without them.
I’d also use Wordle itself as an example of a reasonably user-privacy friendly web application. The only third-party resources it uses is Google Tag Manager (which is blocked by default by uMatrix).
I use Firefox with a number of web extensions (Firefox Multi-Account Containers⁷, Decentraleyes⁸, uMatrix, uBlock Origin, Privacy Redirect⁹). These all provide me, an end-user, much greater control over my online privacy than I’d have with a mobile app. I’ve also recommended Decentraleyes and uBlock Origin to non-technical friends as extensions they can install and not worry about configuration.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30071240
2. https://systemd-by-example.com/
3. https://www.hetzner.com/legal/privacy-policy
4. https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/
5. https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
6. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#ublock-origin
7. https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers#readme
Configure your browser to block 3rd party cookies and you'll be fine.
It's nice to have the private window privacy feature. That's a standard feature of web browsers, but I don't know of any consumer operating system that makes this easy for native apps.
Native apps can be easily denied internet access, but the sandboxing is not as strong.
For this reason, I prefer webapps when the application needs to operate online to work, and native apps when they don't.