The OS Is Losing Its Job Description
At some point in the last two years, the browser quietly stopped being a program you run on your operating system and started being the environment where most of computing actually happens. File editing, video calls, code execution, AI assistants, image generation - nearly all of it now runs inside a tab. The operating system underneath is increasingly just a bootloader with a taskbar.
This isn’t a new observation, but what’s changed is the pace and the complicity. Microsoft, whose entire enterprise identity is built on Windows dominance, has spent the last 18 months aggressively pushing Web capabilities inside Edge that make native Windows apps harder to justify. PWA (Progressive Web App) support in Edge has matured to the point where installed web apps get their own entries in the Start menu, their own taskbar pins, and their own notification channels. They look native. They behave nearly native. They just aren’t.
What Chrome Did First, Edge Is Now Doing Properly
Google shipped PWA support in Chrome years ago, but it was always slightly undercooked - apps felt like Chrome with the chrome stripped off, rather than anything approaching a first-class citizen. Microsoft came at it differently. Edge on Windows integrates installed web apps with the OS permission model, supports hardware media keys, and handles file associations. The gap between an Electron app (which is basically a bundled browser anyway) and a PWA installed through Edge has become genuinely narrow.
The result is that developers shipping tools like Figma, Notion, or Linear now have less reason to maintain a separate Electron wrapper. A well-built web app, installed through Edge or Chrome, is close enough for most users.
The Irony Microsoft Can’t Escape
Microsoft is accelerating this. That’s the strange part. Every improvement to Edge’s PWA handling makes Windows itself slightly less necessary as a platform. If your apps run in a browser, the specific OS underneath matters less - and Microsoft’s own push toward web-first tooling with Teams, Office 365, and the AI integrations in Copilot reinforces that direction.
Windows still has real advantages - driver support, gaming, enterprise group policy - but those are increasingly niche concerns relative to the average knowledge worker’s daily software use.
Whether Microsoft has a coherent long-term answer to this, or whether they’re just optimising for short-term cloud and subscription revenue while quietly eroding the moat around Windows, isn’t entirely clear yet.