[SaintSeiya84]

Out of (ignorant) curiosity: why? just why we need an extra "standard"? and why browsers keep growing to become full OS adding more bloat to the tech stack?

Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

Zawinski himself has stated:

"My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS."

[ajkjk]

The trajectory we're on is for browsers to become consumer operating systems and consumer operating systems as currently conceived to, basically, vanish into the background. This is a good thing, you should want it to happen. All anybody ever wanted was a decent UI/UX that runs stuff, and that's just software so there's no real reason, besides historical mistakes, that it can't run the same on every machine.

The dream is for Explorer/Finder/etc to no longer exist and for the whole computing experience to be something you just download and customize to your heart's content. Just imagine! A day when you can no longer tell you're using Windows unless you're unfortunately saddled with the job of making something run on it under the hood. That's the only way Microsoft's negligent idiocy is ever going to be shut down, anyway. I honestly can't wait.

(... although, hopefully in this new world browsers can run a language that isn't based on Javascript and applications can be built in a language that isn't based on HTML.)

[SaintSeiya84]

No I don't want that, I want an OS that's an OS and a browser that's a browser.

[meindnoch]

Thanks, I vomited a bit into my mouth.

[mschuetz]

Because browsers are by far the easiest, safest, and fastest way to distribute applications. Operating Systems still don't have any sort of meaningful sandboxing so downloading and executing binaries from any source is out of question. With web applications, you can do that. Instantly and uncomplicated. This is not going to change anymore, it's just way too useful.

[breck]

> Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything.

Thank you. Somehow I had missed that expansion, but this makes the quote a lot more helpful.

Perhaps it should be called "Zawinksi's Trap" — to a programmer working on an app all day, the app becomes the operating system, leading them to justify expanding the feature set, which benefits them. For all other users where the app is not the operating system the app becomes more bloated and complex.

[overgard]

3D apps in browsers can be useful, and WebGL is very limited.