> So how come this gets twisted on its head when it comes to web apps? The user should be allowed to do what they want, right? The web needs to be secure again

> So how come this gets twisted on its head when it comes to web apps? The user should be allowed to do what they want, right? The web needs to be secure against untrusted code, so it makes sense that there might be things you can do in a native application that you can't do in the browser. > Why should I _have_ to use native apps if I don't want to? It's not an affront on your freedoms to impose sensible restrictions on browsers' capabilities. > As a web developer, why do I need to learn Qt or GTK or whatever to ship something useful to end users, when I already know HTML and JS and could easily deliver my product if the right native API was exposed? If you want to use your web-dev skills to build native applications, there are various frameworks that let you do exactly that. You can call C/C++ functions from Electron. [0] Of course, you also have the option of learning and using C++ for your own GUI code, with frameworks like Qt. > Remember splash screens? Random freezes? Running out of RAM because some random app in the background decided to malloc 80GB for some godforsaken reason? How is that a better experience than a web app running in a sandboxed tab you could easily kill whenever you want? This is a straw-man. The people you are caricaturing are just people who want technically excellent software. This includes (but is not limited to) the efficient use of computational resources. No-one is pining for the instability of Windows 98. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/39569062/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/39569062/