I'd like you to consider the fact that your operating system is already a significant abstraction and that a browser is essentially a virtual machine that allows to download and run programs from any source safely.

You know all those malware issues regarding unsigned or compromised executables? Not a problem in the wonderful world where programs are incapable of acting overly malicious. There're specs like webgl and webcl that lets you take the scary topic of graphics programming, which is communication to an external piece of hardware, and make that as safe as loading some javascript to sort a table by dollar value.

</rant>