E2EE on the web: is the web really that bad?

In my last blog post, I discussed why people often view the web as a uniquely unsuited platform for implementing end-to-end encryption (E2EE). This view is that the web doesn’t offer a long-term trustable notion of what the application is. In that earlier post, I explored the idea of treating the application as untrustworthy and isolating sensitive data from it. In this post, I’m going to pontificate on whether web applications are truly less trustworthy than native applications, especially in an E2EE setting, and if so, how we should bridge the gap. The gap is narrower than it appears at first glance, especially with desktop applications. To close it, though, the devil is in the (UX- and deployment-related) details.