Figma runs an entire professional design application inside a browser tab — no install, no separate build for Mac versus Windows, real-time multiplayer editing that would have demanded a heavyweight native app a decade earlier. It became one of the most valuable companies in design software without ever asking a user to open an app store.
Photopea, a free browser-based clone of Photoshop's interface built largely by a single developer, extends the same proof point further down market — full layered image editing, PSD file compatibility, no account or install required, serving tens of millions of users on a fraction of Adobe's engineering budget.
Two trends are compounding. Browser runtimes built on WebAssembly and WebGPU have gained the ability to run near-native-speed code and access more of the underlying device, while Chrome's built-in Gemini Nano — a small model that runs locally rather than calling a server — makes it possible to put real AI capability inside that same tab, removing one of the last reasons a heavyweight app needed to be native.
Collapsing everything into the browser trades installation friction and cross-platform complexity for a different kind of fragility — a tab can be closed accidentally, a browser update can change behavior overnight, and the sandboxing that makes browsers safe by default also limits what a browser-based app can ultimately do compared to a native one with full system access.
The shift favors independent developers and smaller teams, who can ship one browser-based product instead of maintaining separate native builds for each platform, at the cost of ceding some control over performance ceiling and system integration to whatever the browser vendor allows.
The app-store gatekeeping model that platform owners built around native distribution — review processes, revenue cuts, discovery mechanics — has much less purchase over software that simply loads from a URL, which is precisely why Apple resisted expanding web-app capability on iOS until the EU's Digital Markets Act forced changes to how it treats browser engines and installable web apps in 2024.
The browser is not becoming the only place software runs, but it is reclaiming enough ground that the old assumption — that real software needs to be installed — is becoming false for a meaningfully large category of use cases, mirroring an ambition web advocates have voiced since the browser's earliest years and repeatedly failed to fully deliver.
The operating system war never really ended. Figma won a piece of it quietly a decade ago. Chrome's on-device model is the same fight showing up again, one layer higher, and Apple's regulatory fight over web apps is the clearest evidence that the incumbents notice.