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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Article should be suffixed with "(2015)". A lot has changed in the past 7 years.

People don't install new apps anymore. They have their go-to apps for entertainment, work and logistics (IG, TW, Netflix, Google Docs, Bank, Uber), a couple of games maybe and that's it.

For everything else, it makes less and less sense to have to install yet another app.

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I still install apps for frequently used products/services if only because juggling tabs with browser UI is always going to be more cumbersome than managing apps with the OS task manager. It's also often useful to have alternative UI implementations easily available – there's been many occasions where something is broken in the web UI but works fine in the native app UI or vice versa, and it's nice to be able to instantly flip between implementations as needed while waiting on bug fixes.

Also, each app increases your attack surface and reduces your security. I only install apps that when I need the functionality and can’t get it from a website. For everything else, I prefer working through the browser, which already has defined permissions and can apply a certain amount of sandboxing.

It's high time we have native local sandboxed and easy to install apps again. Maybe through browser for ui api if we don't know anything else, maybe using a store. I'm not sure somebody has to watch everything I do on a pc.

I don't think you're being sarcastic, but this is where web applications are already. You can do this with the browser as the sandbox.

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