[vendiddy]

I can't remember who I read this from (it might have been Alan Kay) but they basically said the web browser should have been an address bar with the ability to run any sandboxed applications in the screen below. They said the internet well designed but the browser was a disaster.

So hyperlinks were good but the rest was a bad design. An HTML viewer and Javascript interpreter would have just been one possible app to run in the browser.

It is a shame that, to this day, the browser can't easily handle running arbitrary applications. You're still effectively locked into JS/HTML.

[naikrovek]

I agree with all of that. The web today took many wrong turns and each time it did everyone pretended like there was no other option.

We’ve literally chosen the worst version of the web possible. Intentionally.

[vendiddy]

Yes we have. I don't know why you got so much pushback.

Right now innovation moves at a slow pace the web nobody seems to realize the what-if. The W3C announces some incremental improvement to JS feature and everyone gets excited. It just reminds me that all we realistically have is JS.

There are so many hacks on top of hacks. Typescript compiles to JS because, well, you only have JS. So many attempts at compile-to-JS languages. There are dozens of problems that should not exist.

Meanwhile in the native world, you have huge a diversity of programming languages and tooling. No committee is needed for each language to experiment with new features.

The unfortunate part is that the envisioned browser would have been far simpler to implement and more extensible than the mess we have now.