alt Hacker NewsThat's... uh... extremely biased and quite limited? Respectfully, it sounds like you haven't been around the internet for so long ("half a decade" sounds like you're pretty young :-) ).
First, Google did not give us the web. Google gave us a good search engine, then Gmail, then worked very hard towards becoming the quasi-monopoly it is by killing the competition in a way or another. There are countless examples of monopolistic behaviours by Google in... a lot more than half a decade.
Second, I get that you are into web, and hence you can mention "jquery or backbone or react or vue or solid or svelte or lit", but you should really look into what exists outside of the web. There are tons of ways (and even languages!) to write desktop apps or mobile apps!
> where the web doesn't bake in particular flavors of software development
On the web, you do what the browser allows you to do. Just like on an OS. Turns out that there are many more OSes than browsers, many of which are not maintained by BigTech.
You think the web doesn't bake in particular flavours of software development? How do you do multithreading? How do you open a port and receive network packets? In order to run code in a language other than Javascript, you had to wait years for WebAssembly to become usable, and even then, it's not like it was life-changing: you may be able to compile python to WebAssembly and run it in a browser, but... really?
> native apps, on native platforms? those things that run on 20% of computers, that you have to be a licensed paid up authorized developer to ship to, that have very long queues for submitting your app to to maybe some day have it approved perhaps?
Have you ever written a native app? Like, a program that runs on Windows, or Linux, or macOS, or BSD, or Android? Sure, iOS is annoying as hell, but you have mainstream choice* apart from it. What's my alternative to Chrome? A rebranded Chromium? Or maybe Firefox, but still I need to run Chrome once in a while because your great web perfection routinely fails to run on Firefox.
Really, go have a look at what's out there! If you are grateful for Google in 2026, it suggests that there is actually a lot for you to discover. That's exciting!
> Respectfully, it sounds like you haven't been around the internet for so long
Incorrecet
> How do you do multithreading?
Webworkers. Before that, sometimes iframes.
> How do you open a port and receive network packets?
Webrtc, hopefully https://wicg.github.io/local-peer-to-peer/
> In order to run code in a language other than Javascript, you had to wait years for WebAssembly to become usable,
GWT, CoffeeScript, examples go on and on and on. You did have to wait years for wasm. But also, it's fine and in some ways far far better that there are de facti languages for the web, and that's been a huge part of why it's so uniquely rfc8890 compliant, in ways that no mere platform has ever been.
There's more out there alright, but it's still this libertarian what can I do. It's the developer centric view. None of these other platforms improve what can we do. None of them have the ambition to be available on tens of billions of devices. None of them are connected by default, networked, in anywhere near the way the web is. None of them have multi-polar governance & cooperation.
I'm very glad there's other things happening. But also their ambition has been very low. The web remains ridiculously different than every other way to run processes, while everything else (except Erlang/beam) clusters very very tightly around writing single processes that need libraries to build up to http or websocket or grpc or quic. There's been a tragic failure to think anywhere near as big as the web, to develop models where something declarative like the page leads the charge, grounds the programming model in something material, constructible, clear.
Google as far I'm concerned did make the web, added heat and pressure to keep going, to not stop here, to make it fast, gave us examples of use like (via acquisition I believe) Google Maps, and Gmail. We would still have had a web, but the parallel reality if they hadn't been finding browsers, spec writers, dev tools: it's a ghastly impoverished sad world, one where native apps actually look like a good choice for the world.