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Comment by pscanf | Hacker News Reader

I definitely agree that we should be improving browsers in that way, though I'm not sure that it's easy and I'm pessimistic it'll ever happen. Mostly because - cynically - I think that the vast majority of users will never care about owning data and software, so I don't see the incentive for browsers vendors to implement features to make it possible.

In their current state, I personally don't find PWAs + local databases ergonomic enough. So actually what I'm hoping to get out of the platform I'm building is - somewhat egotistically - an alternative that works for me personally and possibly for a few others like-minded individuals, not a browser replacement to take over the world.

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There are many customers that care about owning their own data. Despite what you might think, there are lots of companies that do not trust sending their data to the cloud. In addition, there are lots of companies and individuals that have all their data local, for a variety of reasons (often security) and primarily use desktop applications to work with that data. The "vast majority" may never care, but the compliment is still a very sizable market.

I would love to see another way to deploy local software, aside from building dedicated Windows and MacOS apps. There are efforts in the Docker container world to provide smaller deployment frameworks. There are efforts in the WASM world to replace containers with WASM deployment (which works well in browser, BTW).

> In addition, there are lots of companies and individuals that have all their data local, for a variety of reasons (often security) and primarily use desktop applications to work with that data. The "vast majority" may never care, but the compliment is still a very sizable market.

Is it still?

From what I saw personally, Azure is eating through this market. They give enough of the right guarantees that mutlinational corporations are fine with processing all their (and their customers') data in it, and from some quick research I've been involved in, it's the one (and AFAIK the only one) big cloud provider you can use in EU with sensitive data in a compliant way, up to and including medical data.

Beyond that, what's really left that most business users wouldn't just prefer to stuff into Azure and stop worrying about handling it?

> The "vast majority" may never care, but the compliment is still a very sizable market.

I agree as well here, and from that complement I hope to be able to draw a small community around my product. Still, I pessimistically feel that it's too small a share of users to make browser vendors take notice and build features for them. But of course I'd love if they'd prove me wrong. :)

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