[hackrmn]

I'd argue that depends on what you mean by "innovation" -- Google has been pretty busy, meaning specifically developers on their payroll, churning out more or less useful Web API implementations, certainly at a far more frantic pace than people traditionally _blamed_ browsers of yester-decade for. Nevermind that some of these APIs are more haphazardly designed than others, truth be told most of them are okay and are aptly designed so it's not a critical issue (for Web developers or Chrome's market share). Google co-authors most Web standards and implement them often _before_ the "standard" is published (for better and for worse; anti-trust allegations, I am looking at you). But they're not idle, one thing's for sure. Markedly different than how I remember Microsoft resting for months if not years on their IE laurels, like a CO2 blanket in a room that evacuated all the air.

So yeah, how would you describe this lack of innovation you're referring to?

There can always be more innovation that isn't of the sort I described above, but Web _is_ made of Web APIs -- if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it, is my crude opinion. But I'd love to hear examples to the contrary, illustrating innovation that isn't Web APIs.

Removing tab-based browsing (an anti-pattern if you ask me)? Optimizations (speed, size, etc)?

[friendzis]

Web browsers from 90s can render html perfectly well.

> if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it

Ever heard of native applications? Those could always do the thing, there is not only no reason for web browsers to implement "web apis", but every one of those is actively harmful.

When "web developers" can finally implement a page where focus does not jump around and layouts do not shift around we can start talking about being allowed access to more than plain html.

[hackrmn]

Native applications is a relatively fragmented market of different hardware and OS for platform, made more complicated by relative lack of interest (which is because the market is fragmented, a catch-22), and factors like needing to learn another programming language when you already know JavaScript and how it works on the Web, which is taught to more people every year for obvious reasons. Which is all why Github Electron, essentially a Google Chrome married to Node.js, both _JavaScript_ platforms, made such an impact when it was released. There's zero-install on the Web, too -- just follow a link and you're surfing applications. Python+Qt applications have to be installed, even if that means downloading these -- there's plenty of hosts configured to deny the user the privileges of running software they downloaded, no matter how native and how well mannered it is otherwise. There's fewer pairs of hands on the job (part of catch-22), and there's more standards and APIs to deal with, due to the fragmentation, even for all the cross-platform offerings. All this no doubt contributes to the market staying behind the juggernaut that the Web has become.

Before you roll your eyes and label me a millennial who's not seen anything but the absolutely appalling Web applications of yesteryear, fresh off inexperienced hands of developers who think they invented caching and what not -- I started off with x86 assembler and C then C++ in early 90's, and I hold genuine interest in everything we learned since before Intel made 8088 -- but I am simply describing the reality I see, not necessarily reality I want.

You're drawing a border on water -- there's no need to "separate" the Web from native. The Web is an application platform developed from a hypertext network (the old Web I re-label for comparison's sake), and the platform has tremendous value. You need to have tunnel vision to want to put genie back into the bottle, but again -- I absolutely hear and understand your argument. Do you have realistic suggestions?

Drew DeVault suggested another protocol, Gemini, a while back, having become frustrated with much the same observation you did. Just text mark-up served with efficient text-based protocol -- essentially a regression back to HTTP and HTML anno 1995 (possibly with more semantic elements). I think it's not only a fantasy but also a poor idea -- not because it's a bad idea in itself but because it assumes there's no possibility to do any of it with today's Web, but there is -- it's just that everyone's reaching for the fancy and the flashy once they start coding. What you were referring to with "focus jump around" and "shifting layout". We're sacks of flesh driven by hormones -- that's the best reason I can give you why the same platform that allows you to slap [a HTML that's worth reading](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/), possibly [with a simple stylesheet that does the bare minimum to improve user's experience](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com) -- is _not enough_ for authors. I'd call it "author's prerogative" -- the person who pays for the domain and the hosting, wants to exercise their authoring power and gets carried away with all the bells and whistles they slap on their pages. Users pull their hair out, in silence (or mostly ignored because "do I paint the walls in your house?").

Anyway, this is getting long -- the gist of my argument is that technically the Web is capable of supporting all the static HTML without an ounce of "shitty" scripting that makes everything border on "unconsumable". You're making a "dictatorship" argument along "if you can't make good readable sites, we're going to neuter the platform". But the platform _is_ what drives adoption of the Web, I say, albeit now nearing some cancerous growth from a skeptic's perspective. And yet: fix the _content_, not the _platform_. "Native" is just a word -- there's no native, everything is translated or compiled one way or another, including JavaScript (which _I_ consider a relatively bad general purpose programming language, even under ECMA oversight which fixed a lot of its warts, admittedly). Unless you're one of those ["real programmers"](https://xkcd.com/378/).

[Timshel]

I mean in term of user facing change. Vertical tabs is still presented as an innovation ...

Tabs groups are barely explored, and let's not dream too much of isolation Firefox containers are probably over ten years old and still almost unused :(.

More recently Arc and Zen are trying to innovate (I’m not using either), but they probably have almost no chance as long Chrome stay as dominant and financed by ad tracking.

Using Firefox on linux I’m facing more and more capchas and broken or innacessible websites. Ladybird is making great progress but unless they start posing as chrome they’ll face the same challenges :(.

Edit: > churning out more or less useful Web API implementations

Probably part of the problem since it makes maintaining a browser engine absurdly expensive and out of reach for almost everyone ...