If I thought I was only doing one thing — running — I would be naïve. Even in my leisure, when strapped to a web-enabled device, I’m furiously multitasking and, in a very positive way, highly distracted.

The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.

I’m convinced the gap in experience between a native mobile app and a mobile web app boils down primarily to user input at this point.

The performance gap is illusory for most use-cases & devices. Safari iOS handling of how a keyboard displays, the havoc it wreaks on the page, and limited APIs to control it are a fundamental issue.

Once 120fps animations are enabled by default that’ll be the icing on the cake. But any diminishment in the ability for a human to reliably enter information into the page is a deal breaker.

I don’t want to sketch an overall vision of crisis in telling stories about the world. But I’m often troubled by the feeling that there is something missing in the world―that by experiencing it through glass screens, and through apps, somehow it becomes unreal, distant, two-dimensional, and strangely non-descript, even though finding any particular piece of information is astoundingly easy.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they’re ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place:

Playing the government off newspapers, and newspapers against each other, still does not compare with the power of the World Wide Web.

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old:

The internet has placed power in people’s hands and should be used positively and not to distract people from important national issues.

Could you spend a week or even a day without reading your emails, using social media or going online? Someone recently joked with me that having Internet access is more important than having food or water.

Let's unbreak the web. The web is broken. Let's go out and un-break it and let's bring computation back to these supercomputers that we've got in our pockets [...] Let's ensure that our personal data is owned by us and not by large corporations [...] Let's make computing easy again like it was in the past. Let's build apps that could communicate with each other.

As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.

It was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immesurable, how would I notice?

...Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine loosing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time.

A child now entering first grade has never known a world without the Web; I want you, just for a moment, to try to imagine a world without the telephone, without electricity. It’s difficult to do, because both of these technologies are entirely commonplace, woven into the fabric of our culture so intensely it becomes nearly impossible to imagine a time before they existed. As electricity is for us, the Web will be for our children; an invisible field of knowledge that surrounds them, and infuses the entire world with instant answers to their requests. Within a generation, it won’t be important how much you can remember; that will have been replaced by how agile you are at acquiring the facts you need.