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.
Years ago, on twitter, I described being an ex-Adium-developer with no power to stop the slide into walled off webapps as being able to "see forever while being chained to the floor". It's easy to see what could be when you already built it once and it got taken away.
it is also super important to keep saying this, because there are people who don't know it, whether because they were kids at the time or because they just weren't paying enough attention or spending enough time online to notice the change
... because if we allow corporations to decide how much polish things need to have to be worthy of public attention, that bar will always be set high enough that only corporations will be able to meet it
The metaphor the US military uses is "burning more calories" and it is absolutely a tactic which is effective in a variety of theaters. If you have more resources, then you try as much as possible to shift the fight into axes that require more resources. Even if you have to spend 4x as much, if you have 10x as much to spend (which corporations do compared to communities), then it's Winning.
For example: from the outside, it sure looks like a lot of Google-backed Web Standards exist solely to give Mozilla lots of busy work. The more resources they have to invest making Firefox following Google's goals, the less they have leftover to follow Mozilla's goals. Which considering Mozilla's recent mismanagement probably isn't so necessary anymore, but like... between Dart, and Native Client, and The Image Format Which Shall Not Be Named, they were trying to a browser inviable unless its dev team had a quadruple-figure headcount. Thank goodness NaCl and Dart got righteously dunked on by asm.js and TypeScript, respectively.
For a view from the inside, see "Fire and Motion" (2002) by Joel Spolsky. Description of how Microsoft intentionally-ish keeps its Windows API treadmill going fast fast fast so that everyone else tires themselves out trying to keep up.
until finally I realize that oh, this feeling is frustration because this device is holding me back.
I know, literally in my bones and my brain, what it feels like to interact with a device at the speed of thought; to see all the information at a glance; to have more than one way to accomplish tasks; for the faster ways to be discoverable through the user interface; and to have more input and output possibilities than "press a pale touchscreen button in a sea of whitespace to get to the next screen with only three goddamn items on it."
You used to be able to get faster at computing tasks the more you performed them, if you wanted to. Now almost everything makes everyone move in the same direction at the same plodding speed forever.
The only way to discover keyboard shortcuts for some apps is to Google them -- how many people don't realize those apps even have shortcuts? I've been a computer addict since I was 10, but I used an iPhone for months before I learned that double-tapping the Home button gives you a list of open apps; I just tapped it once to go to the home screen to find the icon, and I imagine a lot of people are still stuck there. They don't know it doesn't have to be this way.
