Recently, I got involved in a discussion on the Fediverse over what I will simplify to the desirability (or lack of it) of cross platform toolkits, including the browser, and how they erase platform personality and opinions. This caused me to have a realization about what web browser based applications are doing for me, which is that being browser based is what lets me use them at all.

My environment is pretty far from being a significant platform; I think Unix desktop share is in the low single percent under the best of circumstances. If people had to develop platform specific versions of things like Grafana (which is a great application), they'd probably exist for Windows, maybe macOS, and at the outside, tablets (some applications would definitely exist on phones, but Grafana is a bit of a stretch). They probably wouldn't exist on Linux, especially not for free.

That the web browser is a cross platform environment means that I get these applications (including the Fediverse itself) essentially 'for free' (which is to say, it's because of the efforts of web browsers to support my platform and then give me their work for free). Developers of web applications don't have to do anything to make them work for me, not even so far as making it possible to build their software on Linux; it just happens for them without them even having to think about it.

Although I don't work in the browser as much as some people do, looking back the existence of implicitly cross platform web applications has been a reasonably important thing in letting me stick with Linux.

This applies to any minority platform, not just Linux. All you need is a sufficiently capable browser and you have access to a huge range of (web) applications.

(Getting that sufficiently capable browser can be a challenge on a sufficiently minority platform, especially if you're not on a major architecture. I'm lucky in that x86 Linux is a majority minority platform; people on FreeBSD or people on architectures other than x86 and 64-bit ARM may be less happy with the situation.)

PS: I don't know if what we have used the web for really counts as 'applications', since they're mostly HTML form based things once you peel a few covers off. But if they do count, the web has been critical in letting us provide them to people. We definitely couldn't have built local application versions of them for all of the platforms that people here use.

(I'm sure this isn't a novel thought, but the realization struck (or re-struck) me recently so I'm writing it down.)