The Browser Company’s Darin Fisher thinks it’s time to reinvent the browser
I&#x27;ve been using &quot;install this webpage as an app&quot; in Edge for about a year now for the vast majority of sites I visit on a regular basis. The site doesn&#x27;t need to have an app manifest or service worker to use the feature, you can just use it with any site. I also develop a Web-based VR app at work, have been doing WebXR and VR development for a while now.<p>The two experiences together have me about convinced that tabs in the browser were a mistake. The operating system already has a means of managing multiple documents&#x2F;app views, and that is just windows.<p>It&#x27;s disturbing that every browser has to implement most of their own media decoders, instead of relying on an OS level API and writing plugins for it. We have file systems for organizing our saved things. Bookmarks should just be links files on disk. You wouldn&#x27;t need to have in-browser sync of your bookmarks, you&#x27;d just point it to your bookmarks directory and let Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever sync the files.<p>If what we think of as the &quot;browser&quot; used more of what is available in the operating system, and operating systems were more closely involved in web standardization (rather than treating it as a completely siloed project) I think we could have better standards for web apps that integrate seamlessly with the user&#x27;s desktop.<p>We might be able to integrate different apps better, things like standardize an interface for image editors, let developers build to that interface, let users select their preferred editor, and have much more powerful image editing available in every app that wants to work with images. We might be able to have VR home environments where web apps represent objects within the user&#x27;s environment, rather than exclusive mode, full &quot;experiences&quot;.<p>And having this ecosystem on desktop would make users expect to have this functionality everywhere. Smartphone OS vendors might find it a hard time to try to make walled garden, only-place-you-can-do-any-business-so-we-get-our-vig stores.<p>But we don&#x27;t. And now browsers are seen as &quot;impossibly complex&quot; (except the SerenityOS team seems to be killing it with Ladybird). All because browsers implemented their own multiple document interface and took over control from what should have been OS-level concerns.