> Everywhere else (desktop, mobile etc) the model is SPAs. > The only reason people distinguish it for web is because of legacy: html + DOM, i.e. Documents. T

> Everywhere else (desktop, mobile etc) the model is SPAs. > The only reason people distinguish it for web is because of legacy: html + DOM, i.e. Documents. There’s another key difference: the other model has preinstalled software and most functionality is on trusted clients. If I email you a Word document, you don’t have to download Word from the Office servers to open it, which creates very different trade offs. There’s also a big difference in trust: I don’t need to ask whether I want each web page I open to have access to the data on my computer. The web’s big selling point was the immediacy of being able open anything quickly and not needing to trust the remote server to run native code on your system (even in the 90s we knew that was a bad idea), so it’s not surprising that there’s so much gravity to its core model. The addition of more app-like abilities is really useful but it’s lead to a certain amount of app-envy where people often pick the cool technical challenge without asking whether they’re working on an app which needs it.