If you want to access a platform like YouTube, Facebook, Discord, Messenger... and it requires an internet connection to access it, 95% of you don't need to download its app, just use it directly through the browser. Whether on a desktop or a mobile.
Why not apps?
- It's bloat.
- App will have more access to user's personal data.
- You cannot open multiple tabs at the same time.
It's browser tabs good enough?
Yes, very good, in fact!
On Desktop
Most of us have been using web browsers to surf social media sites on the desktop. However, the same cannot be said for communication apps like Discord and Messenger. With these applications, people tend to download its own app because they think that they have to do so to use features such as notifications, toggle the mic when voice-call. But do you know that you can get these features even when using it on the web:
- All popular chat applications have a feature to show notifications on the web, but some (like Discord) don't show notifications by default, you just need to go to settings and enable it.
- Speaking of Discord, you can also toggle the mic with keyboard shortcuts like you use on Discord without downloading it: (Guide for setting up mic shortcuts on Windows with AutoHotKey, Guide for doing the same on Linux). That way you can toggle the mic when used with any app, for the whole system.
On mobile
Before 2014, most social medias website is unusable on mobile web browsers, often too laggy, and the interface are terrible compared to the apps. But over time, phones are now much faster now and websites have also significantly improved on browsers. Now day, accessing these platforms on a browser is even better than using apps:
- If you use Brave or Firefox with uBlock Origin, you have ad-blocker!
- You can leave YouTube playing on background.
- Opening links to other websites is more convenient than switching back and forth between the app and the browser.
- You can bookmark any websites and use a unified bookmark manager instead of using the save feature to save posts scattered in each social medias.