"Piracy" today is not stealing IP. It's not even what it used to mean, when it was originally used to describe rogue publishers who violated copyright. IP laws as used today against private downloaders and users are the legalization of plundering of people who do the equivalent of hear a fact/idea and act on it or use it. IP cannot be stolen, an "immunity from plundering" fee is what's being paid (license). The whole justification for it with software, namely copying from disc/internet to local storage, and then copying from local storage into RAM, is a legal formality to facilitate this plundering.
It is plundering those who didn't pay you for legal immunity.
>Counterpoint: is the web browser not already fulfilling the "universal app engine" need?
Counter-counterpoint: Maybe it's time to require professional engineer certification before a software product can be shipped in a way that can be monetized. It's to filter devs from the industry who look at browsers today and go "Yeah, this is a good universal app engine."
>or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time).
As a user, properly implemented desktop interface will always beat web. By properly, I mean obeying shortcut keys and conventions of the desktop world. Having alt+letter assignments to boxes and functions, Tab moves between elements, pressing PageUp/PageDown while in a text entry area for a chat window scrolls the chat history above and not the text entry area (looking at you SimpleX), etc.
Sorry, not sorry. Web interface is interface-smell, and I avoid it as much as possible. Give me a TUI before a webpage.
God damn that drives me up a wall! Mozilla is a terrible offender in this regard, but there are myriad others too!
The user interface is your contract with your users: don't break muscle memory! I would ditch FF-derivatives, but I'm held hostage by them because the good privacy browsers are based on FF.
Stop following fads! Be like craigslist: never change, or if you do then think long and hard about not moving things around! Also if you're a web/mobile developer, learn desktopisms! Things don't need to be spaced out like everything is a touch interface. Be dense like IRC and Briar, don't be sparse like default Discord or SimpleX! Also treat your interfaces like a language for interaction, or a sandbox with tools; don't make interfaces that only corral and guide idiots, because a non-idiot may want to use it someday.
I really wish Stallman could be technology czar, with the power to [massively] tax noncompliance to his computing philosophy.
Master Collection CS6 still works excellently, and is now (relatively) small enough to live comfortably in virtuo. Newer file formats can be handled with ffmpeg and a bit of terminal-fu.
You should probably accept the fact that browsers are indeed application platforms. I'm not saying they should be, or that they are good at that role, but they absolutely are, at this point in time.
Never depend on anything you can't later privateer when the publisher decides to retroactively change the deal (or worse: when they become a subscription "service"). Minimize regular payment sinks. Owning your own infrastructure will always be cheaper in the long run; when you rent, you're paying the cost of ownership plus maintenance plus profit. Sure there may be an economy of scale, but what are you trading for that scale (loss of privacy, loss of sovereignty, loss of ownership, loss of control)?
It is plundering those who didn't pay you for legal immunity.
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