Re:Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
by blub on Sunday November 13, 2016 @08:27AM
(#12943202)
The irony in all this push towards web apps is that browsers will become more and more bloated, out of the user's control and insecure.
Chrome is not a virtualized OS, it has become a mega-plugin similar to Java or Flash, except with better but still insufficient security. As more of the platform services are exposed to the internet, we'll start seeing new and interesting exploits, such as tracking users based on battery status and attacks on the local network (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12406310).
The web has solved these things: it's an open standard which any serious device maker must support to be taken seriously. It can load applications in a relatively safe sandbox on demand. And it does all this with tremendous backwards compatibility that even 90s Microsoft would be envious of.
You're absolutely right Chrome is a virtualized operating system, but that's what it takes to be open and cross platform. Designing a better platform is the easy part; getting it to cross the chasm where it has first class device vendor support on a majority of platforms is the practically insurmountable part. I'm not saying it can't happen, but I don't think any organized group of humans has the power to do it intentionally.