[jesse__]

Why exactly would programs running in web browsers not want the ability to access the most powerful piece of hardware in a users machine? WGPU unlocks an enormous amount of space for userland programs to explore.

I agree there have been some questionable 'advancements' in the web spec recently (web workers as a solution to multithreading, for example, were hilariously inadequate for quite a while), but as far as I can tell WGPU is a solid effort to unlock browsers as an actually interactive platform, instead of the fairly static image/text display devices they are today.

Maybe our visions of what browsers could or 'should' be are different

[mpldr]

At least for me a browser should be an interactive document viewer. Not CAD, not file conversion, not writing OS images to an SD card, not generating GCode. Ingesting HTML, CSS, and JS and turning it into an interactive view of that XML document nothing more, nothing less.