It always strikes me that the angst around browsers comes largely from people who have given up on targeting OS’s for development and use the browser as their OS. You all do realize that if you stop relying exclusively on the JS ecosystem, there is actually quite a bit of choice out there. You know, those native APIs or portable frameworks that some of us talk about occasionally.

I get the economic incentive to develop once and run everywhere, and the education problem where we’ve somehow churned out tons of JS-only developers, but that seems to mean we’ve contributed to the problem that the Apple monoculture is revealing. Perhaps a solution to this is to not rely so much on browsers as our exclusive target platform, and take back some control? Nobody’s making us all move to an exclusively browser centric target for all development…

I get it: native is more expensive, more time consuming, and excludes developers who don’t want to leave the comfort of their NPM/JS world, but it IS an option that one company and one browser engine can’t control. Even if you don’t go full native, there still are things like Qt, GTK, etc. that are at least decoupled from one OS and one engine. Do people really hate the idea of learning the languages and tools required to use those?