The web won... no really.
Nilay Patel clarified a point on The Vergecast that I'd previously referred to. He went out of his way to clarify the difference between the "large media publisher" web and the web as an application platform. It's certainly an interesting lens to view the different web sites. I still think that indie web, web as a distribution platform and writing on the web has and will continue to go up. It's still the one platform that's freely accessible to all with no gatekeepers.
It's sad but what's getting replaced is one slop w/ another. Content farms, affiliate marketing links and SEO optimized drivel will get replaced. It's a bummer that good journalism funded by that mechanism and that will seem to be more anachronistic as time passes. Every business model will come to an end, including Google's search business, unless it also changes with the times.
Nilay mentions that there are interesting web applications coming to the fore daily. Which is absolutely true. There is an entire generation of people who are choosing web development because it has the most mature tools versus native development. See "Is Electron Really That Bad?" and the nugget from "Arc and Dia"
https://twitter.com/joshm/status/1927466374781079799
[3] On Mac, we now use AppKit exclusively. We found that any use of SwiftUI (on Mac specifically) consistently regressed performance. Don't @ us, just what we learned!
To say the obvious, this is a terrible place for Mac native development to be in. AppKit is on the way out and SwiftUI performance is regressing, consistently. I am near confident that if Apple doesn't address this head on in WWDC 2025, this is only going to further accelerate web development. In a way, that's great - because as a fervent supporter of the web, this is what we were all working towards.
A special shout out to Alex Russell - who championed PWA before anyone else. I will dearly remember the conversations we had during those days back in Chrome :)
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