Throwing that out because it's less than optimal at a use case it was never intended to serve would be monumentally short-sighted. Just build something else and leave the web be.
It's truly mind-blowing how much energy has been wasted on trying to shoehorn the web into an app delivery platform over the last decade. To what end? To make the browser a general purpose platform? We have that already, it's called an "operating system".
Edit: that said, I disagree with many points and the general negativity in TFA
In this case, it's that webapps require zero effort and time from the user to get started with, and allow developers to get the closest to the "write once, run anywhere" dream than anything else (if you're doing a decent responsive design, you can even get a good experience on both desktops and phones with much less effort and no gatekeeping), so the development effort is a lot lower.
These two attributes make it really hard for a native app to compete on growth terms with a webapp, since it has a higher hurdle for users, higher initial development costs to target the same amount of users, and higher iteration costs to ship (and get users to install) a new version. It doesn't matter that it's hilariously inefficient; as long as it's just below the threshold where the user tears their hair out, they're not going to jump ship.
It worked OK when we just wanted to run software written by a handful of trusted parties... Microsoft, Adobe, id Software. But as soon as there were 1000s of companies writing software that we wanted to try, running binaries ceased to be a good idea. I don't really trust any binary software on my machine that isn't written by Apple. But I will open basically anything in a web browser because I don't have to trust it.
Even now, with all the sandboxing, Microsoft and Apple still have to manually review software in their stores. And truthfully, app stores are basically a naive Web of Trust system. It's not safe at all. Applications constantly open up holes and then say "oops! Security bug!" and what... you're owned now? But Apple doesn't believe it was a maliciously placed hole, so it's all good? Hell of a security model!
You could download
- a page on it's own
- a page an all pages recursively for up to 3 levels
- optionally filtered by domain or path inside domain
- optionally including javascript (IIRC)
Sadly this is now broken in the new extension model and fixing it doesn't seem to be a priority.
Firefox is still my favourite browser by far but my enthusiasm isn't as strong as it used to be.
On the bright side even if it doesn't seem to be a priority work seems to progress on bringing the new extension APIs to a point where several of the old extensions can be recreated.
