Unpopular opinion: We would've been better off keeping web plugins and isolating those in a "click to play"-container rather than turning the web browser into an operating system.
Browsers are a massive improvement as a platform for developing code, or at least they have the potential to be.
Otherwise mobile operating systems have had isolation and a robust native platform for years. It's kinda why mobile apps absolutely exploded and browsers have been desperately trying to keep up for almost a decade now.
There should be a FOSS OS with powerful OS-level security features, but it just hasn't happened.
This is totally different from the actual capabilities security model, which is closer to a "if you can name a resource you can access that resource". So, for example, imagine every file on your system has a path with a uuid, and there is no "ls" - you'd only be able to access files whose names had been told to you/ that you created yourself.
That's a capabilities model, and Linux does not have that.
Flash on the other hand felt more like a proper programming environment. A shame it was proprietary. And a big shame Adobe didn't open-source Flash Player after discontinuing it.
At what point people decided HTML/CSS/JS is the epitome of user interaction for dynamic applications such as document editing, mapping and routing, media playing, chatting...?
Another factor is cross-platform apps. Web app is still the most cross-platform solution. Also you can create and update web apps without gatekeepers approval.
Perhaps, but I don't spend a lot of time installing applications, nor am I concerned about megabytes of disk usage. None of the web applications I use do anything particularly interesting - all of the interesting applications I use are not web apps.
Web apps give maximum convenience to developers and sysadmins and in some cases, this is a worthwhile tradeoff, but often enough it just makes for an inferior product.
The world people (like you) seem to want is one where the web is essentially dead and everyone just sits around in some subset of waller gardens that they don't really leave, with some minimal amount of hyperlinks available to get content in and out of other products. I have a link to a map, well, you better have Google Maps installed or it won't work. That just seems like a depressing failure of vision to me: the goal should be to get the web to the point where it replaces all of these stupid apps we have to have, so no one ever has to decide if an app is "installed or uninstalled" ever again: all content is immediately consumable at all times with nothing other than a URL. And we could be there if people with vested interests--like Apple--didn't stop actively trying to hobble web standards so people were forced to install more apps constantly.
To me, that's not an interesting application. If you want to use the web to share images or videos, that's fine.
If you want to create such content however, why not have a native application that can actually take advantage of the hardware?
> The world people (like you) seem to want is one where the web is essentially dead and everyone just sits around in some subset of waller gardens that they don't really leave, with some minimal amount of hyperlinks available to get content in and out of other products.
Hyperlinks don't necessarily make my life easier. Let's say I want to get <large file> from application A and into application B: The web would just get in the way. I have a file system and all (native) applications can read/write/mmap it. Import/Export workflows exist. It's a solved problem, the web doesn't need to eat everything.
But then how would the largest companies in the world excise a 15% to 30% tax on the entirety of the mobile app market, and soon the desktop app market, as well?
This is no longer true on iOS and hasn't been for at least a couple years.
But nail in the coffin IMO was Steve Jobs, who decided not to adopt nor Flash, nor JVM in mobile Safari.
So, it wasn't for lack of trying. Javascript won by default, just by being slightly less nasty. Many of us run (selective) Javascript blockers to keep it from being too nasty. They don't always succeed.