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Comment by ativzzz | Hacker News Reader

Maybe my imagination isn't good enough or maybe I've spent too much time on web apps, but as a developer, why would I use this over just making a web app if my goal is cross compatibility?

Users don't install software anymore, outside of mobile. Most things are now doable through the browser. The browser isn't perfect, but from a user perspective, it's a much better app delivery service than anything that's existed before

The only things I find myself installing recently are text editors, programming languages/command line tools, and games. What else? WSL is pretty good so I can even run a lot of Linux things from within Windows now

If I need something that needs raw power that's too much for a browser, like a database server or running an LLM model, I'm just gonna use Linux - why do I need cross compatibility?

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Programs are tools, not services.

Web apps require servers, servers that need to be patched, updated, certificates, DDOS protection, and a number of other things. The apps themselves need management, and maintenance. So a "web app" is a service, no matter how you slice it.

An installed program can work for decades. My personal Wiki (WikidPad) that I run every day, is from an installer compiled in 2015. It just works. I tried to run it under Linux, where it was installed from source, and it won't work. The folks at WxWindows made a major breaking change, so none of the GUI forms/dialogs work, it just seems to work, until you need to change a setting, then it dies.

In theory, you could now create an installer that would work for the next 20 years without issue across operating systems.

> Users don't install software anymore, outside of mobile.

That’s a pretty strong statement without any evidence to back it up. It sounds like the kind of statement I hear often from people who spend all of their time in the web-dev echo chambers. Lots of us install software and don’t spend much time in browsers beyond browsing the web and the handful of Electron apps that we have no choice but to use.

Much software remains outside the browser, yes. Especially games and professional tools.

But it’s not hyperbole to say the browser has become the dominant software delivery platform outside of mobile. Email, CRMs, CMSs, electronic dictionaries, word processors, online chat, filing tax returns are just a few examples of things that used to require installing native apps and now are largely browser-based.

Thank you. My thoughts exactly.

1. Cosmopolitan is great for building terminal apps like HTTP servers, but can't do GUIs.

2. Browsers are great at GUI apps, but depend on HTTP servers and emulate terminals poorly.

So I view the two as being complementary. I imagine it's one of the reasons why Mozilla supported the project. Both platforms solve the portability problem, except for fundamentally different areas. Put them together and you get something greater than the sum of your parts.

Thanks for the explanation!

Because the world is not entirely a web browser.

could be useful for malware developers to be fair, no?

well, couldn't all advancements in this kind of technology be useful to malicious people?

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