They want you to use “apps” even if said “apps” don’t need to be more than a website
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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That’s largely because the companies want to grab all of your telemetry data, which they can’t do in a browser. Putting it in an app allows them to gather whatever info they want, instead of being siloed inside of a browser.
Also because most phones have operational system's that are more secure than Windows, so a app is a easy way to block everybody that don't fit a profile of optimal users and avoid problems/hacking.
Companies dream of a closed internet accessible only from a controllable environment.
You can't datamine everyone and sell it off as completely as you can with an app running locally on the device. Browser apps are far less profitable across the board. It's all about money.
remember internet explorer?
I remember reading an article in .net magazine (now apparently defunct) about IE6 and how it was holding back the web. This sort of thing has been going on for ages the problem isn't crap browsers the problem is crap browsers being dominant. Equally dominant browsers aren't a problem unless they're also bad.
So I'm not really all that bothered about Chrome, it's fairly feature complete and although there are other reasons to not like it, lack of support for the latest standards isn't one of them. Safari however has been truly awful for a very very long time now. They've been memes about how bad it is for well over a decade.
chrome can use their dominant market position to kill all other competing browsers, then they can use their monopoly to kill addons and extensions they don't like, slow down or break webpages which go against their interests, and so on.
google having a near-complete monopoly on the web scares me more than most issues in tech
IDK if Firefox is better or worse to use, I just know I don't want to use a Google browser. So I use Firefox, like on my desktop.
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