Source time Edition date
IndustrySimon Willison
Quoting Paul Ford
引用 Paul Ford
Paul Ford's framing is worth reading because it names the tradeoff that quietly decides which work gets automated and which is left to people.
Judgment
Product and engineering leads choosing a delivery target should re-run the native-versus-browser calculation: if the cost of reaching browser power keeps falling, shipping native-first buys less each year. The tradeoff is ceding performance ceilings and platform control to whatever the browser permits.
Basis
Simon Willison's weblog reproduces a line from Paul Ford, posted 5 November 2026 and filed under the title "The Web Is More Than Enough": "The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day." The mechanism Ford names is cost of access, not capability. The browser's ceiling is already high; what changes is the price of using it, which lowers the team size and budget at which a real application can ship without a native client. Willison's own tag counts on the post — browsers 109, web-development 170, paul-ford 22 — indicate this is a standing thread on his site rather than an isolated remark, which is why the framing gets repeated.
Unclear The quote supplies no measure of how fast that access cost is actually falling, and no example of a workload where the browser still loses to native.
Next Read Ford's "The Web Is More Than Enough" essay and check whether it names any application class where native remains the cheaper path.