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This cracks me up. Modern web browsers really started to evolve in the 90's when security problems really ramped up. You used to just download excecutables and run them on your computer because the functionality wasn't there otherwise. Flash and Java applets were the initial answer to that before Javascript and HTML evolved. We've come almost full circle to browsers basically being little VM's that can do anything again, the main reason they were developed in the first place. Most people's entire computer experience is now in the browser and here come executables again which will require another internal layer to mitigate problems.



The end state ends up looking a lot like (the user-facing side of) an operating system, except that:

* the filesystem is cloud storage (Drive/Dropbox/what have you -- the Unhosted (https://unhosted.org/) architecture)

* the apps are insecure but open-source by requirement (interpreted jS)

* ... running in a controlled sandbox (the browser)

* ... using a standard UI language (HTML/CSS)

* with functionality modifiable/overridable by user preference (extensions)

It's pretty much the ecosystem you would want if you were building this from scratch! Except you'd want Html/CSS/JS to be much more intelligently designed from the start (I'm waiting so eagerly for the day that browsers natively run more scripting languages than just JS...)

It never could be done in the 90s because everything ran too slowly, but it's feasible now.


> It never could be done in the 90s because everything ran too slowly, but it's feasible now.

It used to be called Lisp Machines, Smalltalk, Oberon Juice, Java Jini, Inferno.


Actually, browsers are designed from the ground up to handle insecure code! That's pretty awesome, but comes at a cost: The mentioned additional layer, battery, speed? And it's platform independent!


I'm often reminded of the XKCD quip that web pages are in fact the easily installable executables that so much of the marketplace was looking for over the past few decades.

https://xkcd.com/1367/




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