I don't want Chrome or Firefox or any browser to be the OS, I don't want 99% of the gimmicks that are getting added. I can barely tolerate an OS being the OS given how they are steadily moving to less and less actual control and towards knowing best (Windows updates, iOS turning bluetooth off "until tomorrow" etc etc).
Just in case I'm becoming too old to be relevant, neither do my kids and their friends as far as I can see. if anything they're far more simplistic than me - YT, browsing, and a few chat and social apps. So presumably all this junk is for adtech and tracking, for sites to hassle us on yet another device.
Of my friends who work in tech, none of them seem to much like the monster they helped create any more.
Of course if you use a fancy webmail, Google docks or even something like Facebook it makes sense to have a full blown webapp but I personally seldom use these. But the thing is whether or not you need those feature they still bloat your web browser because you have to have it. How many websites ought to require JS to function properly out there? How many do?
Have you tried browsing the new Reddit interface on a low power smartphone? So much richness that it's barely usable. All that to display a list of titles or text comments. Or how about Discord which manages to lag in my browser despite being effectively a chat application.
Sometimes less is more. We've made it normal for people to use software that by default automatically runs a turing complete programming language for any random website you browse. If we had a tiny little bit of friction for going from website to webapp developpers and managers would think twice before cramming "rich" features and a thousand ad scripts everywhere.
You're right that they're not completely read-only documents but the interactive functionality is limited enough that it doesn't really qualify as an app. You don't need a client-side turing complete language to implement it, just forms. It's more akin to filling some paper form than interacting with Visual Studio if you see what I mean.
Most of the web is still designed around displaying text. Even SPAs that require javascript to display text, for all the faults and valid criticisms that model entails, is still no less of a document in terms of its intended function than a bare HTML page.
This is the statement that I have known for years but never put into words. And it rings terrifyingly true.
When I started using Google services, I knew they were siphoning my data and using it personally and as a group to do machine-learny things. TANSTAAFL. I made that choice voluntarily, knowing they weren't going to be upfront about it.
I also made $8.35/hr at a crummy job when I made that decision. I couldn't afford the services Google offered for free from anywhere else.
These days, I'm working as a competent sysad, making appropriate pay. Now, I can afford for-pay services that can supplant various googly-eyed services. But now, my problem is different: how do I know non-google company doing X that I pay for isn't also making similar deals with advert companies? How do I know my data is private?
Obviously, Google is a SPOF in many ways. I don't like that. But the converse is to pay individual companies for service, and hope they're better than Google with respect to service, privacy, and ethics. But those are awfully nebulous to gauge.
I think this is funny because people also complain that Facebook broke Messenger out into its own app. I realize that "the internet" is not just one person and has varying opinions, but it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't"
When your audience is captive you don't have to pretend to care anymore.
I mean, that's the web summed up in a single sentence. What started as a way to view text and pictures online is now more complicated than many operating systems. You cram all that stuff into a single binary, give lackluster and ever changing controls to manage all that and call it the future. Never attempt to break down the functionality across several dedicated clients that do only one thing and do it well, that's for losers.
But I somehow disagree with your statement in that it seems to imply that the people designing that garbage are naive or don't really think about the consequences of what they're doing. That might have been true in the early days of the web when nobody knew exactly what it was going to be but it's clearly not the case now.
The folks at Google know exactly what they are doing, making browsers more complicated and easier to interconnect with smartphone is win/win for them. It makes it harder to make a competing browser (anybody attempting to make a new browser these days basically has to fork Chrome or Firefox, and generally they go with the former), you need huge developer resources to maintain and optimize it (look at how hard Firefox is struggling to keep up despite the large number of people working full time on it) and while the big G doesn't control Windows, Mac or Linux they do control Chrome and Android so they have a huge incentive to push everything possible away from desktop OSs and into Chrome. They want Chrome to be the OS.
Google is 90's Microsoft with better PR. Well actually it's worse than that because MS didn't usually have access to my private data while google knows almost everything about their users if they have an Android phone and use gmail.