The Browser is dead.
Long live The Browser.
When you get a Mac for the first time, you’re taught the basics. The dock is where your apps live, the ones you use every day. You can pin them, unpin them, open Launchpad for the rest. Or, you press Command, Space, and search. That one input lets you find anything. Files, apps, web results. Type something, press return, Safari opens, and suddenly, you’re on the internet.
This is where most things begin.
You open a browser, you type, you search, you click. New tabs appear, old ones are closed, and you move from window to window, from session to session, across a horizontal bar of icons, words, and shortcuts. One bar for your browser, one bar for your dock, each performing the same task, just in different clothes.
It's been this way for a long time.
But slowly, without saying anything, it changed.
Now, we open our computer to open our browser to open our life. We log in, open Chrome, and there it is. Notion, Figma, Linear, Spotify, Slack, maybe Gmail, maybe Docs. All there. Tabs where apps used to be. Our dock, once the thing that shaped our computer, has become an afterthought. We don’t click apps anymore; we click sites. Sites that behave like apps, but aren’t really apps, at least not in the way our computers understand them.
And it’s normal. It doesn’t feel like a shift, because it happened slowly. One tool at a time, one shortcut at a time, one wrapper at a time.
Take one frog in cold water. Add boiling water, and the frog jumps out. However, if you heat the water very slowly, the frog will just sit there. and sit there. And sit there. All the way to 100 degrees centigrade.
We like to think we’re smarter than frogs.
But here we are.
Building everything for the browser, because it’s simpler. Faster to ship, cheaper to maintain, easier to update. The operating system, once the foundation, now exists to launch Chrome, or something like it. Chrome then launches the rest of your life.
And so, we wrap our websites, call them apps, and call it progress.
A growing number of tools offer “native” versions, but they are not really native. They are Electron shells, browser windows wearing new clothes. Spotify, for example, has a desktop app, but that app is just its website, wrapped and padded, still a browser at heart. To block ads on the web version, a few lines of JavaScript will do. To do the same on the desktop, you need Spicetify, a full injection framework, another app, another step.
If that doesn’t seem strange to you, it should.
We’ve drawn an invisible line between apps that deserve to be in the dock, and apps that live behind tabs. But the distinction is fake. We already know what real, desktop-feeling web apps look like. VS Code, Figma, Cursor; these are all built with web technologies, but they run like they belong. They prove the point we keep trying not to make.
What if every tool you used lived in the dock? Not in your bookmarks, not in your pinned tabs, but on your desktop. Open, searchable, editable, part of your machine, not buried two layers deep.
What if the web behaved like software? What if websites could launch like apps, remember where you left off, integrate with the system around them? What if opening Airbnb was no different than opening Notes? What if pressing Command, Space, typing a name, and hitting enter brought you to a window, not a tab?
Not so different, is it?
Because your bookmarks bar, and your dock, serve the same role. They both point to places you want to go. We just stopped treating them the same. One is part of the OS, the other, part of the browser. But really, they are mirrors.
And here’s where it gets more interesting.
The web is editable. We forget that sometimes, but it’s true. Right-click, inspect, change the text, delete an element, inject a little JavaScript. Everyone’s done it, even if only once. Everyone’s rewritten a headline, or removed a modal, or turned off an ad.
The web is open, not because we want it to be, but because it was built that way.
Desktop software isn’t. It’s sandboxed, compiled, locked away. You can’t change it, not unless you install something else. Not unless you fight it. And even then, it doesn’t always work.
What if that changed?
What if editing software was like editing a webpage? What if you could right-click, inspect, adjust the layout, hide what annoys you, tweak what matters? What if you could do it once, and it stuck? No need to save scripts, no dev tools, no side apps. Just change it, and be done.
And more than that, what if the web, once moved out of the browser, could do more?
What if it could integrate with the system? What if it could read your Focus mode, or your profile, or your screen time settings? What if your web-based workspace knew when you switched from work to personal, and changed accounts for you?
What if opening a site could require Face ID, or Touch ID, or your Mac login password? Like Notes does. Like banking apps do. Why not?
It’s not that these things aren’t possible. They are. But right now, we don’t allow them. We bury the web inside the browser, then we act surprised when it doesn’t feel like it belongs.
But maybe it should belong.
Maybe it always did.
We have the tools. We have the tech. We have the patterns. We even have the muscle memory. We just haven’t let ourselves believe it yet.
And if that sounds extreme, or even scary, I’d ask you to look at your phone.
On mobile, this is already normal. You want to use Twitter? You go to the App Store. You want YouTube? App Store. Instagram, Spotify, Calendar? App Store. Install, open, done. Apps are real, they live in your system, they launch like software, and they live offline too.
So why not on desktop?
On desktop, we can skip the install step entirely. We can skip the store. We can make it instant. Press a key, type a word, launch a window. And that window doesn’t have to pretend to be anything. It just is.
Now, take a second to think about how many apps you’ve installed on your phone that you’ve only used once or twice in the past three months. A flight tracker. A recipe viewer. A one-off tool for a specific task.
Remind you of anything?
Like a research article you open once. Like a guide to cooking something you only make in winter. Like a website you visit in April, and don’t touch again until the following year.
You didn’t need to install anything to view it. You just opened it. You needed it, and it was there.
That’s how it should work. You don’t install a file, you don’t install a folder. You don’t need a separate application just to view one thing, once in a while.
Think about your desktop. Your taxes, saved as PDFs. Your family photos, sorted in folders. Your old music files, dragged in from who-knows-where. You store them however you want. You find them when you need them. You don’t have to install anything to see them.
Now imagine doing the same with websites.
What if you could save a website like a file? Drag it into a folder. Rename it. Move it wherever you want. Open it when you need it. Finder becomes your bookmarks bar. Launchpad becomes your tab manager. No need to build a fake file system inside your browser when your OS already has one.
We have built an entire operating system inside the browser, not because we needed to, but because it was easier to build there.
Treat websites like files, and everything makes sense. Airbnb.app. Webster.app. YouTube.app. That one already exists; but only on iPhone, not on desktop. Odd, isn’t it?
We’ve chosen what gets to be a native app and what gets trapped inside the web, and the choices have very little to do with what people actually want.
Do you see the point I’m making?
We’ve forced users to open an app, just to open their apps. We’ve trained people to accept a second layer. To accept that their work lives in a browser. To accept that their tools don’t belong to their computer.
But they could.
And maybe, they should.
What if you could type, press enter, and your life appeared?
Just the thing you asked for,
And a place for it to live.
Right where it belongs.