is that until 2014, you could choose your display layout by choosing a different client.
want a grid of smaller feeds, separated by website? there's an rss client for that. or, was.
want a non-columnar Twitter layout? they existed.
want all your chat clients in the same view, including Slack via irc? pidgin and other clients could do this.
now we have webapps because companies want metrics and shorter development cycles and don't want their ads blocked at the client level and want to use tracking cookies. there's good reasons too, but I don't think they're ever just the good ones outside of scrappy small developers.
web 2.0 wasn't round corners, broadband, and a performant web. that was a side effect. web 2.0 was the web transcending the browser. Unlike what the cryptocurrency boosters say, we're already in web 3.0, a reaction, a regressive contraction. The web we're currently trapped in is the web of the browser and the browser alone.
