Paul Ford: The Browser Is Now Powerful Enough to Build an Office Suite in Two Weeks
The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford
Paul Ford built TinyLittleOffice, an office suite that stores documents in the URL, in roughly twice the time of a long newsletter post — and it drew hundreds of thousands of visitors, crashed his Cloudflare free plan, and cost $0 to host. The browser now offers Web Crypto, WebAssembly, WebGL, and Web Audio, and Ford argues these once enterprise-only tools are becoming accessible to individuals, which could reshape the app store economy and the tech industry itself.
The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.
- azangru
> So take a look at Simon Willison’s new web-based browser 3D game, Battle Drones. He’s hosting it on GitHub. He wrote it himself. He’s not a games builder.
I checked the repo, and it is written by Claude. Does this count as writing it himself?
- simonw
I like this statement:
> The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day.
It's wild how much easier it is to build things that harness web technology these days. I'm building features on top of three.js and offline storage and SSE and WebAudio and WebAssembly multiple times per week these days. I used to tinker with some of those maybe once or twice a year.
- Kuyawa
It is, and I'll tell you my anecdote...
I am developing a game and right now got iOS, macOS, Android, web responsive, Rust for Linux and Rust for Windows versions ready. Six different source folders for the same game. It is exhausting even with the help of modern tools
If we could use just one tech stack providing native parity without drawbacks for all of them that would be the final achievement in software development, but I still think we are decades away from that
- the__alchemist
For anyone having a hard time following the comments or mentality: Someone explained in a HN comment a few weeks ago in a comment which has helped clarify in my mind: Web (And especially SAAS) developers make up a large portion of HN users. They use and love frontend frameworks, Node, NPM, and using web tech for many tasks, as a first line of tools.
- palata
I know it tends to be an unpopular opinion, but to me the Web is too much, really.
Many people (me included) like to complain about how systemd is trying to overtake everything, but browsers are a lot worse than that. Even if I can realistically choose my OS today, I have to run most apps in a browser. And the browser landscape is not that nice in terms of freedom: Google controls it through Chromium, Apple manages to force their users to use Webkit, and Firefox... is marginal.
More than that: I can realistically assemble my own OS, that is actually feasible. The one tricky component that I will need to integrate, though, is the browser. And the browser landscape, again, is totally controlled by BigTech.
Pushing for webapps is pushing to lock us into Chromium, controlled by Google. I don't see what's great in shipping a copy of Chromium embedded in a webapp and calling that a "desktop app".
I want control and diversity. The Web is far from there, and for some reason people love that.
- maelito
We're rebuilding Google Maps on the Web, and the Web only with https://cartes.app.
The main problem we're struggling with is mobile OSes' will to hide the possibility of installing Web app on our devices, and deactiving things like the vibration API. Not the Web itself.
- galaxyLogic
Web-tech is basically user-interface tech. Its super-power is that you can commit your GUI to be on the web, while the servers can be implemented with anything. The web-gui must have the most users world-wide, largely because all you need to install isss a wweb-browser and you get access to unlimited applications.
Any application can have a web-GUI, so why not have it, and they do, because that allows more people to use the app, with the standard conventions. Once you learn the basic functionalities of the browser (like back-button etc.) you can benefit from that knowledge with any app.
This starts to look like the good old OSI-model thinking. GUI is one layer, and like other layers it can be standardised.
- galaxyLogic
WEb-tech is basically user-interface tech. Its super-power is that you can commit your GUI to be on the web, while the servers can be implemented with anything. The web-gui must have the most users world-wide, largely because all you need to install isss a wweb-browser and you get access to unlimited applications.
Any application can have a web-GUI, so why not have it, and they do, because that allows more people to use the app, with the standard conventions. Once you learn the basic functionalities of the browser (like back-button etc.) you can benefit from that knowledge with any app.