>Nobody wants a damn web view.

OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this instance).

FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.

It's not just HackerNews. I can remember when Facebook rolled out their "in-app browser", and a huge amount of content appeared on how to disable it.

That was partly due to websites being broken. You can still find some old discussions on Stack Overflow about features of their websites not working correctly in it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000708/file-upload-con...

> This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users.

My wife just didn't know what a web view was (she still doesn't), but she prefers using the browser after I showed her how to "escape" Facebook's web view and open pages in Safari where the content blocker and ad blocker extensions could do their work. You probably have a point about preloading pages, but until content and ad blockers start working in all web views, then I agree with the person you're replying to: nobody wants a damn web view.

> Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people.

The back button supplied by the OS is perfectly capable of this (at least on Android I have witnessed this)

Something I see relatives do sometimes is they get a link to a facebook event over meta's messenger, and then they click the link and it opens in messenger's web view, which inexplicably isn't signed into facebook, so they can't view the event, and they don't understand why, as they are signed into facebook in their web browser.

They're also often very confused why they can't find links they've opened in web views in their browser's tabs or history.

> The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.

I think you misunderstood. The problem wasn't/isn't that sites were mobile sized on mobile devices. The problem was/is sites that optimize for mobile, and look terrible or are hard to use on a desktop or laptop screen.

In-app webviews are a usability disaster for normal users, I need to help a relative out of one at least once every few weeks.

The webviews don't have adblock so they fall for ads and scams, sometimes they don't properly follow UI scaling, they don't have the cookies or saved passwords needed to, for example, read a paywalled newspaper article that someone linked...

That's just asinine. Just because any user would like fast navigation doesn't mean privacy only matters if you know what a violation it is to ping every server in sight on user's device, with absolutely no way to prevent it.