> I'm honestly not even sure what people are talking about with some proliferation of "apps". There's discord/slack, and...?
Are you not familiar with Gmail or Google Maps or YouTube?
> I already have an operating system.
But Gmail and Google Maps and YouTube don't run on the OS. And this is a feature -- I can log into my Gmail on any browser without having to install anything. Life is so much easier when you don't have to install software, but just open a link.
> Use your browser, and if you click on a link to an app, you'll be prompted to open the link using your default handler for that mime type.
But I like having news links in Gmail open in a new tab in the same window. The last thing I want is to be juggling windows between different applications when tabs in the same app are such a superior UX.
Imagine how annoying it would be if my "app" browser had tabs for Gmail and Maps and YouTube and my "docs" browser had tabs for the NYT and WaPo and CNN, and I couldn't mix them?
Or if the NYT only worked in my "docs" browser, but opening a link to its crossword puzzle opened in my "apps" browser instead?
That's a terrible user experience for zero benefit at all.
(And I still would have to remember which is which, even if there's a MIME type, for when I want to go back to a tab I already opened!)
Calling gmail or youtube apps is already kind of a stretch. Gmail splits everything into separate web pages with the associated loading times and need to navigate back and forth. Exacerbating this is that it paginates things, which is something you only ever see in web pages. It lacks basic features you'd expect out of an application like ability to resize UI panes. Youtube has a custom, worse version of a <video> tag to prevent you from saving the videos (even CC licensed ones, which is probably a license violation), but is otherwise a bunch of minimally interactive web pages.
Maps is legitimately an interactive application, though I'd be surprised if most people don't use a dedicated app for it.
The point is you wouldn't have an "apps browser" with tabs. If something is nontrivial, launch it as an actual application, and let the browser be about browsing websites with minimal scripting like the crossword puzzle. Honestly there probably should be friction with launching apps because it's a horrible idea to randomly run code from every page you browse to, and expanding the scope of what that code is allowed to do is just piling on more bad ideas.
Are you not familiar with Gmail or Google Maps or YouTube?
> I already have an operating system.
But Gmail and Google Maps and YouTube don't run on the OS. And this is a feature -- I can log into my Gmail on any browser without having to install anything. Life is so much easier when you don't have to install software, but just open a link.
> Use your browser, and if you click on a link to an app, you'll be prompted to open the link using your default handler for that mime type.
But I like having news links in Gmail open in a new tab in the same window. The last thing I want is to be juggling windows between different applications when tabs in the same app are such a superior UX.
Imagine how annoying it would be if my "app" browser had tabs for Gmail and Maps and YouTube and my "docs" browser had tabs for the NYT and WaPo and CNN, and I couldn't mix them?
Or if the NYT only worked in my "docs" browser, but opening a link to its crossword puzzle opened in my "apps" browser instead?
That's a terrible user experience for zero benefit at all.
(And I still would have to remember which is which, even if there's a MIME type, for when I want to go back to a tab I already opened!)