Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Regarding all the arguments about ever-increasing browser complexity and the resulting inefficiency:

Why is nobody asking the reverse question: How to make operating systems more like browsers??

From the end user's PoV (consider someone who isn't computer savvy) what are the actual objective differences in usability, between the OS and browser?

--

• OS: Apps have their own windows and menu bars.

• Browser: Multiple apps run in a single window, and have no menu bar.

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• OS: Need to download and "install" apps before you can use them.

• Browser: Just type the app's "name".

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• OS: Need to make sure apps are compatible with your OS and hardware. Need to keep apps updated. Need to delete apps when out of local storage space.

• Browser: Nope.

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• Browser: Lets you share links with people to show them exactly what you're seeing in an app (YouTube, HN, Reddit)

• OS: Nope.

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SO. Instead of constantly reinventing the wheels that have been perfected by operating systems for centuries, and then machete'ing through the resulting struggles of power and politics between the OS and browser,

WHY NOT REMOVE THOSE HURDLES FROM THE OS?

All of this is perfectly possible. End users don't seem to want to use these features for native apps for some reason, though, and developers seem to have all switched to the web instead of building native experiences.

It makes sense: native apps need to be developed for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and maybe Linux. Web apps need to be developed once. Android apps will work on Android, ChromeOS, Linux (after some setup), and Windows, but I doubt Apple is going to add an Android runtime to their platform any time soon.

App stores are on every major platform and custom URIs for sharing app state and views are implemented on phones already. Most people seem to run their desktop applications either full screen or nearly full screen. Pin the Windows task bar to the top of the screen and you've basically got yourself a tab bar. I don't know about macOS, but Android and Windows will start clearing caches and temporary files automatically under storage pressure. Sandboxing applications is available on all platforms as well.

I don't want every website to become a native application, though. I don't trust most websites enough to download native code from them. Let's not go back to the ActiveX/Java applet days where you needed to download some scary code for every website you wanted to visit.

I don't see why I would benefit from WebGPU support, I think I'll leave it disabled by default. It's probably one of those technologies that'll be useful for platforms with overbearing control (i.e. how game streaming on iOS is made possible). Maybe some small itch.io games will make use of it so I don't need to download Some Guy(TM)'s native executable every time I want to try a small experimental game.

The better question is do we even need so many apps to begin with? Do we need YouTube, Dailymotion, TikTok, Vimeo all to be their own app? Or should they all just use the something like NNTP but for video sites?

one can hope that with web assembly we can get closer to that dream, and eventually just remove the whole web browser.

.jar files exist and so far they haven't replaced any browsers as far as I can tell.

They already did, it is called app stores.

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