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Comment by ethin | Hacker News Reader

Hot take but I think the entire concept of a "web app" needs to die. My web browser does not need access to my GPU, OpenGL/Vulkan, USB, MIDI, HID, <insert whatever other weird invocation of Cthulhu that exists here>. All of those are things a native app needs, not a website. IMO if you need that kind of access and your instinct is to do it as a "web app" your doing it wrong. Same thing, I would argue, for things even like WebAudio or WebSpeech. At this point my web browser is so complicated that it might as well be a mini-OS of it's own.

Like, I think that the instinct to make everything a web app is what partially leads to things like what this article complains about. Well, besides laziness, of course.

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For many of these things we're not talking about a web app though. It's frequently just a form, disguised as something more. I agree that the browser should be stripped back, but none of those things prevent my banks website from allowing me to do a payment.

E.g. your fitness tracking app or your parking app, they don't need any of those features. They can work perfectly fine as simply forms, they aren't "apps".

I know, but my point was that this should just not be a thing. Our web browsers have become way too complicated and then you get outcomes like what tfa talks about.

I largely disagree. The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform. Thats text, images, videos, animations, interactivity, video calls, etc.

At the very least, I disagree about GPUs, OpenGL/Vulcan, and various audio and video related things.

> The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform.

Says who exactly though? The big companies and web devs who think your browser needs raw access to HIDs? Why exactly does a web browser need this level of access when a native application is far superior (and doesn't need to deal with the limitations of a web browser)? All this does is require that browsers be more and more complicated and be more and more invasive so that we can pretend that the web browser is our operating system. That in turn makes it harder and harder for web browsers to even be implemented in the first place.

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