[schiem]

Maybe this is a hot take, but it seems like browsers have essentially become what the operating system should have been, and it's the reason that everyone crams things into web apps / Electron instead of building native applications.

Browsers have a set of APIs that are decided on by a standards committee, and you have to implement those standards if you want your browser to be compliant. As an application developer, all I need to do is check a page to see how widely a standard has been adopted and then use it - I can be sure that my code can ship to (nearly) every device and behave uniformly, with minimal tweaking.

If the operating system had gone that route, we wouldn't have had to build more layers on top of it to abstract away the differences.

[reidjs]

From this perspective it makes sense why Chromebooks are doing so well, especially among general computer users.

[pjmlp]

Browsers are just yet another take on remote access to timesharing systems.