Comment by jakevoytko

17 hours ago

Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available. We had Google Docs that didn’t roll-your-own for each of the items in that list and it was called Writely and it was absolute dogshit (but super cool for its time) because those limitations were too extreme. And by extension it wouldn’t make sense to have Chromebooks as a category of hardware, because web software could never compete at a feature parity level with native software.

> Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available.

I was already in favor of banning it. You don't have to keep trying to convince me.

Okay, snark off. But as someone who dislikes the proliferation of "web apps", I'd be perfectly happy to see Google Docs and others die off if it meant we moved back to real, locally run applications.

  • To the walled garden app stores? On most platforms web is the only uncensored way to deliver apps.

    • Right -- like the famous zinger about democracy, Google Docs is the worst implementation of collaborative word processing except for all the others that have been tried.

I would rather not have Google Docs than have all the other crap that comes along with allowing every website to do stuff that Google Docs "needs".

Seems like exactly the kind of thing permissions are for.

  • That is indeed how things like copy/paste through the menus already work; you install an extension to get the clipboard permission or the browser limits you to keyboard shortcuts