Tabbing, history, bookmarking, seamless syncing across devices.. the web is great, but scrolling shows how slow it can be.
Whether or not folks apply good practices is very much up in the air, & honestly, we have a lot to learn & relearn. Eventually I think we'll see more integrative front-end & end-to-end architectures that steer better towards success, that bake in more smart choices. Ideally atop more sensible & aware data-store systems/caches.
Somewhat different outlook on the web myself, but in general we're still speaking the same language here & I appreciate & support this post.
Back/forward/history can be nice in some circumstances, but to me if I find them needed to make a web app usable, it's an indictment of terrible navigation UI/UX design on the part of the app. It's not that difficult to design an app to not need to lean on browser controls, but it does require a bit of a more holistic approach to UI/UX design than is commonly found in web apps (where instead, everything tends to be diced up into heavily silo'd screens).
The other gripe is that these apps are making my tab clutter problems worse than they need to be. With a PWA I can make use of OS window/app management functions to help keep things sorted a bit better and make my tabs almost entirely transient rather than constant presences, easing tab management.
But I absolutely positively do not want an "app" like experience. I want it to open in the browser chromez where I have tabs, where I have forward & back, where I have an address bar. Native apps are awfulz, useless limited half-shells, and I want everything to be web. The fucked up conflict is that PWAs attempt to appeal to native app enthusiasts, give developers power to make it looks like a native app, but God damn native apps are shit & the web is 300x more reasonable fair & useful.
I'd love to install some up jumped bookmarks. But wow native apps are just so limited, such a worse model to emulate, with so much less power. PWAs need a realignment where they can respect the web more. As is, they're more like retrogressive quasi-native apps. Yulou have a strictly downgraded experience for clicking the install, loose tons of thr basic web capabilities. Native sucks.