I hate it. It’s useful for enterprise systems, since the people using that often need to access it from any device. Image/video/sound editing? Let me have an installed program and DON’T MAKE IT FUCKING ELECTRON. Most of the things I use don’t connect to the internet, so I’d have to self host anyway, so I’d rather have the full application rather than run a localhost server.

As someone who 3D prints as a hobby, I prefer Chitubox over Lychee because the latter is an electron app, plus they force a 30 second ad wait when you click “slice”.

I understand the convenience, but I don’t like it. All my data is on someone else’s computer, and I have to enable activity trackers for the privilege of accessing my data? Heck nah.

If the major OSs could treat a web browser instance like a separate app, I wouldn’t hate it so much. Like I want a dedicated thing on my taskbar/dock that will always take me to my google calendar. I hate having to search through browser windows (even when named) to find the right one.

I use a seperate browser for aws console to make it quicker to find.

But I do love being able to have more than one tab per app (like for aws console) which most standalone apps don’t support.

What “mere users” wanted used to be the prime directive for software development. Now it’s whatever scheme the marketing team comes up with.

It’s terribad, the only glimmer of hope is web assembly and the related apis, but ultimately it’s just adding another layer to the onion that will eventually have sensitive data and important interfaces to protect and require yet another layer on top.

Also it’s a sneaky way of exploiting foss without contributing back.

A bit too broad to give a specific answer from my side.

Overall, I prefer web based over apps, because I can CSS hack and if necessary JS hack them.

Web also means it doesn’t litter my PC or mobile phone or tablet. And that it can’t fetch more data than it needs or I want it to have access to.

Bad software is bad software, no matter if it’s installed or on the web.

I get all the advantages (portability and distribution mainly) but I also think we did the transition to web in the worst possible way. We basically took all the shitty solutions that were there 20 years ago and started improving them gradually at the same time as we moved everything to web. The result is that web apps are security and privacy nightmare.

What I think should have happened is that some standardized execution environment should have been defined that would use HTML/CSS for rendering but would also apply strict security. I would base it on web assembly, not javascript. You would be able to embedded this environment in a browser or install it at OS level. It would download an app package from a domain and by default only allow network communication with that domain. Everything else would have to be approved by the user. Basically something like web based android apps but stricter or Electron but lighter and distributed over the web. Instead of doing that we’ve spend 20 years perfecting lazy loading of JS scripts so that each website can have 400 trackers. And yes, I know we can do it now with Tauri but it’s not very common.

Personally I really don’t like it too. But I just don’t care because:

• I have all needed software locally
• I have all documentation locally
• I’m going to Web only to get updates (by-hands of course, no autoupdates without verification!)
• I’m old software engineer and how to automate it all without losing ctrl ;)

People don’t like downloading things unless they absolutely have to. It immediately puts a weight against anyone using what you’ve created. With web based, there’s nothing to download, and it works on any platform that can run a browser.

For a lot of things I would rather have something web based than app based. I hate having to download some random app from some random company just to interact with something one time. Why do all restaurants, car parking places etc require apps rather than just having a simple site. Not everything should be native first IMO.

As a dev: for all their flaws, web apps are easier to distribute, portable, and have a lot of support in frameworks. They also require little infrastructure in most cases.

As a user: web apps run without installing anything, are mostly portable between my browsers of choice, and run in a sandbox to protect my computer.

Probably 90% of my needs can be served by a web app if it is well designed. If I can’t have a web app, I will look for a flatpak version and failing that I will look for it in my distro.

When possible, I prefer all of my tools to be in terminal. I’m not particularly interested in graphical user interfaces, or using my mouse at all. My only real exception is if I am doing digital art, but otherwise I look for either a terminal version of the app I’m looking for, a TUI, or I make a small terminal based app that utilizes the api of the service I am trying to access.

It’s better than everything being exclusive to Windows, but I’d much rather everything just ran natively on Linux…

I generally prefer native local applications wherever possible, and for a long time I was against the movement to web based tools. That is until one thing changed. I moved to a different department at work. In this different department, I am issued with a Windows 11 laptop that is extremely locked down. It cannot run any executables aside from those whitelisted. I cannot run anything as administrator. If I need anything new whitelisted, I need to write a full page justification, get an endorsement from my manager, and then it can take over a year to get approved (but most likely will be immediately denied).

Obviously one thing it can run is MS Edge. All of the company tools and systems are webapps on the intranet, accessed via Edge. Now I’m grateful there are so many high quality browser based webapps around.