At the same time, we are now living in the future. With "pocket super-computers" that are more powerful than the Crays that existed when you were waiting on 300 baud text rendering, yet we are using 13% of that power just to render a blinking cursor? Does that not seem like we haven't made as much progress as we should have?
The point being, for the past decade or two, we've been burning all hardware performance improvements on things that are neither visible to user, nor enable them to do more with their computer. Surely, there must be ways of spending those CPU cycles and RAM bytes on things that are actually useful and enable people to do more / better / faster work.
Windows 7 boots in approx. 5 seconds to the desktop (if no password is set), and stuff like Word or Visio starts instantaneously. Web applications on the very same computer are a whole different story.
Let's just acknowledge that SaaS is not and never was about any kind of benefits for the user or customer, but just about either centralising resources and services back to the vendor's control and/or increasing money extraction.
I mostly use Ubuntu and there Libreoffice still has a stupid splash screen. After that though the amount of time is too small for me to count.
Please try to find a single example where this is true. Niche cases and greater diversity all come from a lot of work keeping runtimes up to date and APIs backward-compatible. This is only because of Free Software. Trying to credit this to "abstraction layers" is insulting to all of the programmers working on Free Software libraries, compilers, runtimes and operating systems.
So, I can't give a specific example but am instead pointing at the diverse ecosystem of applications and rich functionality. It's logically impossible for me to prove that these apps wouldn't exist without inefficient abstraction layers. It's my supposition, and the developers who write electron apps would probably agree.
The literally millions of applications not written on top of the specific crapware you list are an existence proof. This was the case even with assembly/Pascal/BASIC applications on microcomputers in the 1980s. Your whole argument is that somehow the web stack is easier to write applications on top of because <insert nonsense adjectives like "diverse" and "rich">. To go back to the Pascal example, a lot of people who program in Delphi strongly disagree even today, and Delphi has been around since 1995. What makes you think that the web stack has a higher speed of development than other software tools? Why do you think that high-speed development depends on inefficient abstractions? That is all total nonsense. There are a lot of problems with the web stack. You need to stop making up bullshit rationalizations and learn about other approaches to software development.
If speed of development isn't the reason, then what is the attraction? I'm serious and curious. I looked through your profile and you clearly know your shit. Are we just in a period of a bad stack being popular and used despite there being other, better options?
Google Docs uses the Internet, so did anything on an old modem. Word didn't (especially 20 years ago).
I'm not sure your arguement makes any sense.
"10secs! I was supposed to be at work 15 seconds ago!"
Sometimes I think that comments like these arise out of not having experienced text-only rendering at 300 baud...
I know that's a generalization, and most likely unfair - but damn, today's phones, to this old man, are pocket super-computers (for that matter from my vantage point, an Arduino is a wonder, and a RasPi is utterly amazing)!