Microsoft spent years telling people that Windows was the platform. Applications were compiled, installed, updated, and occasionally broken by the OS itself. The browser was just another app sitting inside that ecosystem. That framing is now almost completely backwards.
Look at what most people actually run in a browser today: email, documents, spreadsheets, video calls, project management, code editors, design tools, music production environments, even photo editing. Figma runs in a tab. VS Code has a full web version. Photoshop’s web port is functional enough that Adobe markets it seriously. At some point, the browser stopped being a window into the internet and became the actual working environment - with the OS reduced to something that handles drivers, security patches, and the login screen.
Google saw this clearly enough to build Chrome OS around it in 2011. The initial reaction from the tech press was mostly mockery: what happens when you’re offline? What about real software? The criticism wasn’t wrong at the time, but it missed the direction of travel. The offline problem was solvable. The real software problem dissolved as developers moved to web-first distribution models, not because anyone mandated it, but because shipping a URL is dramatically easier than maintaining platform-specific binaries.
The irony is that Windows 11 is now quietly acknowledging the same reality. Progressive Web App support exists. The Microsoft Store has been pushing web apps alongside traditional installers for a couple of years. Edge gets updated silently and frequently in a way that would have seemed unusual for a core OS component a decade ago. The browser is being treated more like infrastructure than application.
What This Means for Platform Lock-in
It cuts both ways. If your tools live in a browser, switching from Windows to macOS, or from an Intel laptop to an ARM Chromebook, becomes dramatically less painful. The switching cost that kept enterprises on Windows for decades was always partly about software compatibility - and that dependency weakens every year more tooling moves to browser-based delivery.
But Google now has a different kind of lock-in. Chrome’s market share sits above 65% globally according to StatCounter’s publicly available data. If the browser is the OS, then whoever controls the dominant browser has unusual leverage over what the computing experience looks like, how extensions work, which APIs get standardized, and what gets deprecated.
That’s not a neutral shift. It’s just a different monopoly wearing more comfortable shoes.