I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose.
> we keep pretending that web apps are documents that need to be shown in tabs.
Browsers do both web apps and documents (and honestly, blur the lines between them all of the time).
Also, I for one wholeheartedly want tabs for both of those use cases (and I don't think I am by any means alone in wanting that).
There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last couple of decades. It's whole purpose is to develop apps using this hypertext document rendering engine. You're not wrong by saying that browsers' main job is still rendering HTML documents. But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps.
Here are tabs I have open at the moment:
- HN (board app, not a document)
- Soma.fm DefCon radion (music streaming app, not a document)
- Facebook (social network app, not a document)
- Eurosport Player (video player, not a document)
- research paper (PDF, document, but not HTML)
- another forum (board app, not a document)
- Canva (graphics editing app, not a document)
- Miro (whiteboard app, not a document)
What's the forum?
As someone who does web development, and has been doing it for longer than the last couple of decades, that statement seems unnecessarily dismissive.
> But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps.
While I would agree that the quantity of web pages people visit today that are 'apps' is substantially larger than it used to be, I do think there are a lot more plain HTML documents in use (particularly in boring corporate environments) than many who frequent HN would think.
Of course, if you are going to call anything that executes a significant amount of Javascript an 'app', I am not sure I'm interested in the argument.
My original response wasn't arguing about what was most common anyway -- you said "Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore." I was just pointing out that they still do a lot of that (and for things that I would not consider to be an 'app'). Admittedly the line between 'app' and 'document' is a bit fuzzy in some cases, but there are enough cases where (in my mind) it is not fuzzy that I still don't see your original comment as accurate.