But unlike the year of the Linux desktop (any year now!), the promise of the Web as the app platform of the future seems to recede ever further into the distance.

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JoshTriplett 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The web is the app platform of today. Many, many things that would have been local applications are now web apps. Document editing, email, chat, collaboration...

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criddell 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’m hoping that great AI means we get back to native apps and leave the web house of cards behind.

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JoshTriplett an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm hoping that more native apps get rewritten as web apps so they can stay in a browser sandbox where they belong. "Fortunately", we'll probably both get all the slop we "want".

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wry_xy an hour ago | parent [-]

Yeah I find it interesting that HN's love of performance seems to overpower their love of security. Especially since nearly everyone here has better hardware than average people.

I do not enjoy running random strangers' Rust on my machine unless it's sitting in a VM and probably also a container, at which point the performance benefit is gone anyways.

I recently moved all of the desktop apps I reasonably could to browser tabs and have been quite happy with it.

Oh and don't forget how easily you can modify the source. With a simple user script or extension I can modify your website to behave exactly how I want it to without recompiling.

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Karrot_Kream 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's largely because when Electron first came out the browser app platform (the API availability, performance, etc) was still quite thin and Electron was quite slow. HN just got stuck in this echo that web browsers are very inefficient and have no benefits while native apps are so much better. Java had the same echo for a long time on nerd forums because the JVM was a lot slower than native compiled apps for the first few years of its development.

In practice since then, browser-based apps ended up eating a lot of the demand for native apps and the web browser as a platform ended up displacing a lot of native apps, but the echo has stayed around here with little grounding. As such the distribution, security, and performance posture for browser and mobile apps has become a lot better while native app toolkits have lagged behind.

There's certainly a possibility that agentic development will make native development "cheap" again and encourage a lot more of it. But the web platform's security posture is much more well fleshed out at this point so I'm not sure.

	▲	JoshTriplett 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Electron also papered over the problem that browsers weren't evergreen, so if you ran in the user's browser, you might not have support for current web APIs you want to depend on. Most browsers are evergreen and updated frequently now, to the point that that no longer seems like an issue.

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knollimar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's players like apple making PWAs not have all the features they should, though

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waterTanuki 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Linux has been smashing records on the steam hardware survey for months now. People I knew who refused to touch anything else but windows are now using framework laptops with Mint or Ubuntu. 2026 absolutely has been the year of the Linux desktop.