[pjc50]

Hmm. Java went through this with AWT and Swing. You can have "identical on all platforms, nonnative, missing some native features and look&feel" OR "native features, look and feel, but different across platforms". Embedded browsers are closest to the former.

It sounds like solution (for spotify at least) is better methods for each platform of creating a GUI around web services. Microsoft have sort-of had a go at this.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The solution is to promote the browser to a full VM container, with both low level and high level APIs for graphics, sound, networking, and so on.

Browsers are already closer to this than most people realise. By the time you've included websockets, openGL, webaudio, and bunch of other stuff, you're 90% of the way to a useful OS.

The problem is that the current state of the web "OS" is a random collection of ad hoc APIs hacked together for a completely different job, and it's very badly designed for what it's trying to do now.

In a perfect world the FOSS world would collaborate to thrash out a new spec, and also design a new browser to follow the spec which was backwards compatible with standard HTML etc, but also included new and more efficient APIs for much faster performance.

Something like this has already happened on servers - see also, containerised VMs running RoR or Node or whatever you want - and it's only a matter of time before it happens in browsers too.

The problem is that the current plan seems to be to build a VM layer on top of the existing DOM/js/etc layer, which will kill performance even further. It should really replace it and emulate it.