[joeevans1000]

Browsers can be just as powerful as 'native' apps. This is an example of that. Browser apps free the user from proprietary operating systems and their companies. Of course, Linux is a way around that. However, why not just write it once and let students and engineers the world over be able to share and open files easily?

UPDATE: On my newer laptop thius is faster than my native apps. And I was literally drawing shapes within 30 seconds of clicking on the link to this app. Compare that to the nightmare of all the other tools out there with registrations, email clutter, 2FA, and on and on. Oh, and cost in most cases!

UPDATE 2: I have no connection to this team other than having just seen a post online about this tool. I've been navigating the world of SketchUp/AutoCad/Revit recently so this of course is totally thrilling. Especially for what it means for the future.

[gmueckl]

This is just blatantly wrong. There are so many native resources that any serious 3D application requires access to that are blocked by browsers that this statement just isn't true and never will be.

[abe_m]

Out of curiosity, what native resources are needed? It seems Solidworks mainly needs access to the file system, GPU, and perhaps networking. GPU and networking in the browser, and the file handling could be implemented over the network instead of locally.

For most current pro CAD, certainly there are a lot of calls to Win32 libraries on Windows, but those aren't fundamentally needed by a CAD system. There was professional 3D CAD before Windows.

I don't know what native hardware would be needed that isn't already accessible through current Chrome?

[joeevans1000]

That's why I said 'can'. Once OS's lift restrictions on what browsers can access then we'll finally have something more close to 'write once run everywhere'. But that wouldn't really help the proprietary software systems and companies.