The real golden paradigm shift here is that this treats web apps like apps, rather than web apps as some sort of hack on top of the web, instead of the natural evolution that has occurred.
If a web browser is for web pages on the world wide web, then maybe it's time to start considering that we need an app browser. Something more distinct than browsing the web for documents, and something that has first-class support for truly browsing for apps.
This seems to be the sell, and I find it very convincing to think about in this regard rather than some "glorified web browser." There is potential here, and I'd like to see this explored.
Does this open up the potential for a faster browsing experience? Perhaps there's a double win here. What if we move towards a world with web browsers reverting to their original nature; a document browser that explores just hypermedia, while tailoring app browsers to handle web applications specifically.
We essentially have this already in a crippled form on mobile devices with deep-linking.
Browsers were originally designed to access static pages and with the growth in adoption of SaaS applications it slowly became the default operating system for web apps. As you mention at the end of your comment, we don't believe that browsers will die, just a new category of apps like ours will emerge that aim to provide a tailored experience for web applications - an experience that neither web browsers neither existing operating systems can offer today.
I think browsers will always be there, we don't aim to replace them but the way people use them will shift. The mobile analogy is the most powerful I think: we do use mobile browsers on our smartphones but only to actually browse the web while we have a dedicated OS (iOS or Android) to actually handle all our apps. We want to build what iOS and Android built for mobile but on desktop.
If a web browser is for web pages on the world wide web, then maybe it's time to start considering that we need an app browser. Something more distinct than browsing the web for documents, and something that has first-class support for truly browsing for apps.
This seems to be the sell, and I find it very convincing to think about in this regard rather than some "glorified web browser." There is potential here, and I'd like to see this explored.
Does this open up the potential for a faster browsing experience? Perhaps there's a double win here. What if we move towards a world with web browsers reverting to their original nature; a document browser that explores just hypermedia, while tailoring app browsers to handle web applications specifically.
We essentially have this already in a crippled form on mobile devices with deep-linking.