Young folks won’t remember this, but back when I was the pimply faced youth, comparatively little of your Internet time was in a web browser. You’d use a lot of distinct protocols and clients. You’d read threads on Usenet (basically Reddit but ancient), chat on IRC (think Discord but not terrible), browse file archives in an FTP client, read your email in a POP3 client. The Web was just static HTML pages. Even CSS wasn’t a thing yet, you can forget JavaScript.

The drive to pack everything into a web browser makes me physically ill. Every web app makes the world worse by existing. Not to be elitist, but I genuinely think that web apps mostly exist to keep shitty programmers who can't handle C employed.