[astrobe_]

You still have 15 applications, it's just that now they appear as tabs in your browser - which is actually a virtual machine in disguise.

I see the news in the front page of HN: Edge, Firefox, Ladybird. The problems with privacy, funding, etc. will remain as long as one refuses to do an "AT&T" on the Web, that is delegate the non-essential browser functions (text, image display) to other applications (e.g. VLC for video, audio).

With a strong emphasis on banning remote code execution (JS), the father of all evils.

It may be convenient to call a coworker from Teams in your browser, but it is not a sane way to do it because we end up to where we are now: browser oligopoly. Convenience can be a trap; scammers and phishing use it all the time by including "direct" links. People are told again and again to know better and use their bookmarks instead.

[Groxx]

The kind of flexible dynamic delegation that'd need (outside extremely simplistic uses) really doesn't exist in any OS that I've seen. And it would have to be quite sophisticated, to resist abuses and ensure latency is as low as it needs to be. I'm not sure we'd be in any better place if that happened - browsers would be simpler, but OSes and those media players/plugin-able things would gain significantly more complexity to offset it.

If your goal is to get rid of all the fancy stuff, then yeah - gopher still exists, all UX can be thrown out the window, it all exists today. But I don't think that'll go anywhere, except in extreme niches.