Comment by soanvig
6 hours ago
> much longer than the lifespan of websites
But browsers (and browser technologies) have documented track of being fully backward compatible up to the beginnings of WWW, and it's not going to change.
Which actually is much much better than any other environment you can imagine - unless of course you use (and want to use) that one frozen in time 25 year old PC. And pray nothing breaks (y2k bugs and whatnot).
If the software is open source (and works offline) you can have it functional in 10 or 20 more years. And it will be "locally-installed software you own" you want.
"Fully backwards compatible" isn't really true, and even if it were, then you're stuck using browser-based software and its myriad of inherent downsides.
People (generally) use web-based apps that are good enough in spite of the web stack -- not because of it.