can someone tell me what the difference is to the webclient? Seems like a webview to me. No local caching/store.
Between this phenomenon and the refusal of many to close tabs in their browsers, I can't help but wonder if a huge percentage of the populace have never heard of or used Bookmarks on their web browsers before.
Anyways I think that capability still exists on all modern OSes.
In-browser apps do all sorts of clunky things like going back a page because I'm trying to scroll right or left or hotkeys not working. Native apps feel so much better to use and I can close my browser and stay focused on the task.
I have too many bookmarks, I'd never find anything in there. Keeping it open is the only way.
It's an incredibly flexible system that allows for a massive variety of workflows and it feels like people just keep finding ways to recreate it, but worse: less platform-independent, eating more system resources, dependent on third-party plugins, or (in the case of using an app for everything) eating up orders of magnitude more storage space at rest.
The web went to shit a long time ago; you can't rely on being able to bookmark a site and then go back to where you were. Half the sites are infinite scroll, or dynamically generated pages, or SPAs[1], or some other ephemeral invention du jour. Keeping a tab open gives you some chance to return to where you were for some time; bookmarks are just giving up.
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[0] - At least until the browser decides to screw with you and unloads the tabs you needed. Firefox on Android is particularly aggressive at that, which incidentally makes PWAs unusable, too.
[1] - You're lucky when those let you make a bookmark that won't drop you back to index page when loaded.
I suppose I actively avoid most infinite scroll webpages because to me they feel like they're meant for "consumption" and visual appeal rather than actual usefulness and I tend to think of webpages as tools, either for information or socializing. As a dev I'm certainly biased towards sites like Github or news sites, which are both meticulous at sending you to the page you were linked to specifically rather than redirecting you elsewhere.
I do tend to keep a few tabs open at any given time, but only when I'm in the middle of reading something like an article or blog post. I try to close down my tabs to something like 5-8 max weekly, if not daily. Something about closing out the mental context and making a conscious decision about whether I really want to finish reading something or if it was boring me feels very freeing once I've decided to close the tab is deeply satisfying to me.
My question was not meant as a critique of people who know what they're doing. I'm not talking about engineers or sys-admins like the typical HN crowd, I'm talking about the population at large. The average person understands their devices just enough to get them to work the way they want. It stands to reason that a fairly large percentage of the modern population, used to using apps for every individual service, may never have had a use for browser bookmarks and may therefore never have even attempted to use them.
I have a few friends who work as professors and tell me stories about how their students don't know how to navigate a filesystem in Windows. Why would a person like that, for instance, have bothered to learn what a bookmark is vs just keeping a tab open?
The only real benefit is the hotkey (ctrl + alt + space) for starting a new prompt when the window is closed, but still running in the background.
option + space for mac, and alt + space for windows.
You'd think, a company that has such powerful AI and no restrictions on requests to it would be able to bash out truly native apps no rather than something that looks quite shoddily made, like making your electron app not flash white when in dark mode is amateur level stuff.