> So you think the best way to increase OS diversity is to get developers to submit their apps to proprietary app stores that only run on their own respective operating systems.

No, I don't. I think that having different tools, more or less specialized for particular platforms, is better than using webtech everywhere. My reason being that I tend to hate webtech and all it represents to me: I don't like unmanaged language package managers like npm and how they allow devs to have no clue about their dependencies. I don't like Javascript. I don't like having to run a browser to access Discord, or alternatively to have a fake Desktop app that is essentially a hardcoded one-tab browser. I don't like to run complicated webapps in a tab that can freeze my whole browser. I don't like that if my browser crashes, all my webapps stop. I find that pushing for WebAssembly to run everything in the browser is completely overkill given that we already have tons of ways to run stuff on different OSes. I don't like how web people tend to not know anything not web (including native/non-native-but-not-web mobile apps, native/non-native-but-still-not-web Desktop apps, mobile OSes like iOS/Android/Linux-based-but-not-ubuntu, Desktop OSes like Windows/macOS/Linux/-BSD, embedded OSes like OpenWRT/-BSD) but still claim that webtech is better.

I like C when it makes sense, I find merit to C++ in many situations, I think Rust is interesting (except for the language package management which seems to come straight out of the webtech hell). I like Java/JVM and its evolution in the last years (no, it's not just an interpreter and web applets since the beginning of the century, but too many web people missed the memo), I find that Android has done a lot of interesting stuff with JIT and AOT, I think that GraalVM is really promising. I love Scala and Kotlin, and the new Jetpack Compose way for UIs (coming to Desktop apparently). I wish I could spend more time on Swift and discover SwiftUI, and I had fun learning Flutter and Dart (though it's still has the fundamental issues of cross-platform frameworks IMO). I don't know anything about .NET, but it doesn't seem bad. I like making custom Linux with fun tools (buildroot, Yocto, pmbootstrap) or learning how relatively mainstream distributions work. I like running stuff on -BSD (not in a browser, actually on the system). I like how Linux distributions approach their package management.

I am a big fan of open protocols, which mean that I can run my TUI IRC client (written in C) on my OpenBSD, my favorite email client (written in Go) on my Alpine Linux, and a whole bunch of stuff like git/gpg/ssh/podman/pass in CLI. I can even enjoy tools written in niche languages like Hare!

Those things I like, TO ME, represent diversity, and allow me to choose the tools that are more ergonomic for me, and even to contribute to them. Webtech, TO ME, represents those shitty Slack/Discord/Teams/NameYourCloud proprietary apps (and those are the good ones), written by people who want a one-size-fits-all solution so that they can be more productive by knowing ONE tech and making ONE mediocre app that will run badly on all those systems they never cared to study, governed by rules like "no need to optimize for memory, memory is cheap ahahaha!!!1!". All that forcing me to run full-blown apps (and not websites anymore) in a damn browser, in a world where Safari is Apple's way of refusing webtech for as long as they can, Firefox is a joke (which I use, don't get me wrong) and everything else non-Chrome is about customizing Chromium and pretending that they own their codebase.

PWAs are a promise to move that shitty world out of the browser and into mobile devices (because ElectronJS already succeeded in moving that shitty world out of the browser and into the Desktop... by duplicating a browser I did not choose, and in my back). All of that is transforming my Desktop OS and my mobile OS into basically a big browser that I hate (Chromium) running bad apps written with webtech that I hate.

Native Android and iOS apps are not perfect of course. But they are not webtech. And at this point I'm holding to anything that is not damn webtech (or worse: "AI" bullshit).

Go on, tell me why I should not feel the way I feel or, even better, prove it to me, with cross-references to whatever you find (I still won't click on your links, though, I really don't give a shit).

> then we could move on to the security question (and you'd lose that debate too).

I am not here to win (is there a price for the winner?). I would genuinely be very happy if you taught me something (just a small thing) about why browsers are fundamentally better in terms of security than any other kind of sandbox I can imagine. But something constructive, like why it is that whatever is used to sandbox processes in a browser cannot be used to sandbox processes outside the browser. Or why granular access control works in the browser and fundamentally cannot be used outside of it.

But if it is to tell me that browsers are better because smart people spend a lot of time working on V8, or that web people invented access control last year, please don't lose your time.*