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Comment by svnpenn | Hacker News Reader

> If people have to install an app just to us your site, then many of them won't bother.

If you have some "thing", that is so grotesque that it needs to break a users web browser in order to work correctly, you no longer have a "site". You have a creature, you have an application. Some people would step back at that point and maybe think about the path they are going down. Others would trundle forward, oblivious to the fact that they are hammering a square shaped JavaScript peg into a round hole.

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In the year 2022, the browser supports full motion video, 3D rendering, dynamic audio synthesis, local key value database storage, a USB access API, and an API for interacting with head mount displays and hand trackers.

The simple dynamically-linked page displaying application you are imagining a browser to be is long dead, in much the same way the simple programmable calculating machine that was the personal computer was long dead by the time John Carmack got it to run Doom.

> If you have some "thing", that is so grotesque that it needs to break a users web browser in order to work correctly, you no longer have a "site". You have a creature, you have an application.

There is nothing "grotesque" about writing web applications.

That is the entire point of HTML5 + CSS3 + AJAX.

With modern Chrome-based browsers and Firefox I can write an application that can be used by Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, iPhone and Android users who need only visit that site.

No installation necessary, and (most importantly) no gatekeeping of apps by Apple, Google or Microsoft.

> No installation necessary, and (most importantly) no gatekeeping of apps by Apple, Google or Microsoft.

This is kind of misleading, as you need to install a browser for it to work. Granted, most computers already have that, but the browser is acting as a "runtime" in this situation. Contrast with other programming languages such as Go or Rust, that produce a single executable that can be dropped in a folder and ran.

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