alt Hacker News> When you load a webapp, you download and run it. It's actually pretty similar to "installing and deleting right after use".
The big distinction is security policy. There is a tremendous amount of things you can do in the browser that you cannot do on the desktop if you do not own the computer.
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Ironically, though, when people are doing everything in the browser, being unable to do things on the desktop isn't much of a security benefit. In theory, restrictions on cross-domain data sharing are supposed to make things better. But we still see plenty of browser vulnerabilities, XSS hacks, and various sorts of trickery that allow people to exploit web apps in their own way. Moreover, a sizable part of the security is illusory anyway, because the web apps themselves are trying to spy on you in a multitude of ways.
That is an interesting point, but I think that moving everything to the browser is a workaround, rather than the elegant solution.
When you do not own the computer, I assume you are prevented from doing some stuff for security reasons. The problem being that you could easily break your computer, and your company does not trust you not to do it. But I would argue it's a security model issue on the OS.
Typically, it is not an issue on mobile OSes, because apps are sandboxed by default. And users generally have fewer issues installing mobile apps than installing desktop software, it seems?