You're not alone. In another 20 years, you'll get to laugh tragically as a new generation of naive young techs invent yet another layer of abstraction on top of the browsers and gush about how this time it will finally be a universal platform. And your old 2TB of ram, 50 core cpu laptop might even still be able to run a text editor with only a few seconds of latency.

And it goes without saying that, for your own safety, none of these platforms will run code that hasn't been delivered by a trusted and approved corporate appstore.

The future of computing is very grim.

With more power, comes more stacks of needless abstractions...

20 years? Is that a typo? Actually sincere question -- because it feels like the time horizon for adding another layer is closer to 2 years, not 20.

No, I hate it too. As a consumer, I wish to do my computing in my machine and not in SaaS provider's machines, having to share with them personal data when there's no technical reason to do so.

I think the main driving forces on this are:

1. It's easier for computer illiterate people to use web services, since they don't have to go through an installation process.

2. It's easier for developers to support their users because they don't have to worry about their users' computer environments, which is largely out of their control.

3. It's also harder/impossible for their users to pirate their software, since they it never runs in their machines.

I think the biggest reason (and the one harder to fix) is the piracy one.

> 3. It's also harder/impossible for their users to pirate their software, since they it never runs in their machines.

I think your second point is actually the dominant one, but you're not wrong about this either. In some sense, we get the computing landscape that we (collectively) asked for.

4. It's easier to justify charging a subscription to your web app customers

But why is it always necessarily "awkward and clunky"? As always on network connection becomes more and more ubiquitous, internet connected experiences become better and better. Just look at (well-designed) experiences today like streaming video.

I'm excited about things like WASM that will allow browser-based experiences to close the gap more and more with native apps. The web infrastructure is extremely powerful and has a fairly low barrier to entry so lots of people throw crappy experiences up, granted, but it's generally a good thing to have the resources so accessible.

The web is awkward and clunky because it's a document markup format with bad application APIs layered on top.

WASM solves certain problems like arithmetic being slow. This doesn't fix the web's problems; it merely enables a new class of bad apps to be written on the web.

The best streaming video services are not web based. Thank goodness Netflix and Hulu have native iPad apps to spare me their websites.

> As always on network connection becomes more and more ubiquitous, internet connected experiences become better and better. Just look at (well-designed) experiences today like streaming video.

As not everyone even has a network connection, I find this kind of viewpoint outright dangerous because it leaves out hundreds of millions of people. Streaming video, in particular, seems to choke if you don't if you don't have the absolutely best connection.

Is it really surprising that in the wake of multiple platforms that refuse to interoperate that an OS that runs on top of every other OS is massively popular?

It doesn't matter that it's clunky and bad, CS people love working with hard to use systems, it just matters that it works.

The websites google.com and facebook.com and twitter.com (to distinguish from their mobile apps) are very popular, but the most part these sites just render text and images.

google.com doesn't try to search my local drive. faceboook.com doesn't offer to share my local photos. Their usage of "browser as an OS" is extremely limited.

I worry about the other problem: the browser becomes so ubiquitous the OS disappears, along with any platform conventions and application interop.

Not to mention that cloud based software inherently gives MUCH less control to the user.

Same here.

I also get to pick native development over Web whenever possible.

However many of the gigs happen to be Web based, thus here we are.