Installing
Installing
[Cueball and Megan are standing next to each other.] Cueball: Installing things has gotten so fast and painless. Cueball: Why not skip it entirely, and make a phone that has every app "installed" already and just downloads and runs them on the fly?
[Caption below the panel:] I felt pretty clever until I realized I'd invented webpages.

This comic refers to the kind of "inventions" which seem new from the point of view of a smartphone (handheld computer ) user, but have already been around for a long time on desktop or laptop /notebook computers.
Cueball has a clever idea to skip the installing of applications on mobile phones: he would host the applications online instead, and provide links to the servers. The apps wouldn't stay on the phone all the time; instead the phone would download each app again every time the user wanted to run it.
However, web pages and web applications already work like this. Clicking a link will make the browser download a web page and render HTML code and JavaScript that it links to.
The page usually isn't saved long-term on the user's computer; instead the browser downloads it again when needed. HTML5 does however offer the option of caching web application files locally so it can remain operational when there is no network connection.
In the title text, Cueball's idea for local application storage already exists in the HTTP protocol as cookies . The more flexible web storage was originally part of the HTML5 specification, but it's now in a separate specification.
Native phone applications and web applications are not completely interchangeable. Web applications may not allow access to more advanced or platform-specific resources. Projects like Apache Cordova make these resources available to web applications by creating a native application wrapper for the web application.
[Cueball and Megan are standing next to each other.] Cueball: Installing things has gotten so fast and painless. Cueball: Why not skip it entirely, and make a phone that has every app "installed" already and just downloads and runs them on the fly?
[Caption below the panel:] I felt pretty clever until I realized I'd invented webpages.
