[tacos]

This too is a narrow view. Another way to look at it is that people were building apps in the browser and they needed to do real stuff. Browser apps needed to talk to devices, legacy systems, card readers, EEPROM programmers, medical imagers... whatever the hell it is that people jam into Windows. And those devices weren't magically going to sprout a REST interface. There had to be a transitional period.

Microsoft had been making developers happy for a decade by giving that exact sort of functionality in local file Explorer, in Word, in Excel, on the desktop, via COM/OLE/VBScript and god knows what else. So they tried it.

The blood/brain barrier between OS and Browser remains up for debate a decade later.

The W3C remains woefully understaffed and even today hasn't solved basic problems that were solved in the dumb terminal era of the 1970s.

There's a lot of shit that got shoved into the browser when we were excited about browsers that shouldn't be there. Likewise there's a LOT of OS-level functionality missing from the browser that may or may not belong there, but which I don't see appearing in the next 10 years either.