[stronglikedan]

Those type of people live and work in the browser. Everything's a PWA. Little to no native app use. Like to manage apps (windows) by browser tab management instead of OS management. At least it's consistent across devices!

[TeMPOraL]

I'd consider doing that if I could rely on the browser not losing state after OS restart, browser restart, unexpected forced browser restart because of some autoupdate bullshit, accidental refresh, automatic unloading of tabs, badly thought-out shortcut for closing the browser window, unexpected update of the web page/PWA into which I typed something, accidental cookie wipe, certificate expiry, lack of reliable form of local storage[0], and a bunch of other things that make me consider everything in the browser ephemeral unless stored on a server.

(I'm not a browser fan, but even in my weaker moments, this one thing is what stops me from fully embracing living in browser.)

--

[0] - AFAIK there's still nothing in the browser one could reliably use to get the equivalent of persisting data to a hard drive. There's like 5 different mechanisms that could allow it, if you could rely on any of them, and of course none of them are user-inspectable except through dev tools.

[crazygringo]

But literally everything you describe is worse outside of the browser.

My browser does a better job of retaining state than most of my apps. My desktop apps have clunkier auto-update than my browser. My browser apps auto-save to the cloud, my desktop ones often don't auto-save at all.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm talking strictly client side. I literally said "unless stored on a server", and let me remind everyone that "cloud" just means other people's computers.

(Also that "serverless" really means "there actually is a server, but you don't get to manage it".)

Desktop apps can save files and read files. That alone puts them miles ahead of any purely client-side app. As for convenience, most apps today auto-save stuff when you're not looking, but lack of that feature isn't a big deal for me - I started using computers some 25 years ago, so I habitually press "CTRL+S" every couple seconds without even realizing it.