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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

I guess that's why no one uses The Internet or Web Browsers. Pack it in, fellas, the web is a passing fad.

That's not what I said, I live half my life within browsers. But big chunk of the population that you are probably not thinking about is not like that. My mother in law is using browser to read on her computer, and will never do that on her phone - the screen is too small and the whole experience not something that fits someone at her age. On the other hand, my children use apps since they are two years old, and at the age of seven they still rarely if ever used browser.

The screen is too small to use a web browser, but not too small to use an app? Can you explain what you mean? This doesn't seem at all reasonable.

The screen isn't too small to use web browser presenting site that looks just like the app, obviously. It is too small for comfortably reading or using the browser in general, so using the phone's browser for searching stuff on google is something that many older people simply don't do (in my anecdotal experience, I have no hard data to back this claim up). Searching for the train times in city z, going into a web site and finding that it is actually identical to the app and just as useful is something that is very unlikely to happen to my mother-in-law.

My 80 year old dad struggles trying to type on his phone. He uses voice to search YouTube videos for sermons, music, how to videos and to make calls.

There are a lot of websites that don't scale well with small screens.

Just the simple trick of zooming in on a website with a "2 finger pinch/pull" is something a big part of the population doesn't even know how to do. I know my mom would probably just give up.

Buttons on many websites are way too small for some people to use.

Those are never an issue on native apps. The UI on apps scale with the size of a phone's screen. No matter if you have the smallest iPhone or the largest Android.

This alone is enough for many people to not use the web browser unless absolutely necessary.

>On the other hand, my children use apps since they are two years old, and at the age of seven they still rarely if ever used browser.

Most of the people writing on HN were first exposed to the internet through web browsers. On the other hand, children these days who grow up with smartphones first interact with the internet through phone apps. Do they have any difficulty adapting to the unfiltered web when they grow older?

I sure hope not. I don't have definitive first hand experience though as my kids are not old enough to have to use a computer and they haven't grow much interest in that direction. When my dad's first PC arrived home it was for me the most exiting thing ever, but it didn't have to compete with a smartphone.

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