I think the race to make the web an application platform is responsible for this. Web features are growing every day trying to match native apps, and the media guys leverage them to make us sad.
We really need to split the web stack in two somehow, differentiate consumption sites with some basic interaction from full blown applications, handle them completely separately down to the operating system integration level. Right now a web application like Facebook runs in a tab (?) or worse is shipped with a whole browser instance (eg Slack). That’s something wrong here.
A Google-AMP like version of the web for things that are not GMail or Facebook (99% of the web, especially in the long tail) is probably good enough.
Well, it's also that the "web app" push only ever concerns itself with features never with performance.
You'll frequently see things like "native apps can do X, so the browser should, too" where X is camera, opengl, files, etc...
Not necessarily wrong, but you basically never see anyone pushing the boundaries of performance. I can run games at native resolution in excess of 100fps all day long, but I can't scroll a fucking web page at 60fps? And the round-trip communication with a webworker, the only mechanism whatsoever to leverage the other 75-95% of the system's CPU, is measured in 100s of microseconds to milliseconds?
Being an app platform isn't just features, it's also getting the fundamentals to perform well. And the web just... doesn't.
I love my web apps - I vastly prefer them to native apps. They don't need to be installed. Are mostly sandboxed from my native OS. Are trivial to update and even more trivial to use.
I don't even kind of understand the hatred directed at giving people actual giant useful full featured application that often is on a few meg in size and can be loaded by merely visiting a URL.
We really need to split the web stack in two somehow, differentiate consumption sites with some basic interaction from full blown applications, handle them completely separately down to the operating system integration level. Right now a web application like Facebook runs in a tab (?) or worse is shipped with a whole browser instance (eg Slack). That’s something wrong here.
A Google-AMP like version of the web for things that are not GMail or Facebook (99% of the web, especially in the long tail) is probably good enough.