Browser vendors must start to move away from top-down innovation, where they hoard APIs such as TCP and UDP and release sub-standard specs in their stead. Instead they must expose only the bare minimum OS low-level APIs (TCP, UDP, POSIX), keeping the surface area as small and powerful and direct as possible, and then let open source grow around this. Innovation needs to be decentralized, bottom-up. Not designed by committee.

For that to happen, we need to stop conflating "web apps" (trusted, installed, annointed with machine power) with "web pages" (accessed by single link click). At present, Web Apps are suffering and crippled by being lumped under the same security policy as web pages. But Web Apps need to have access to raw machine resources in the same way that Native Apps have access.

Those that don't seem to care for any of this insistence, tend also to be naive as to the massive differences between TCP and WebSockets, and IP and TCP and the whole stack in general. The WebSocket spec is a good example of people doing things in the most indirect way possible, with a maximum of red tape, as opposed to people doing things in the most direct way possible, with a minimum of red tape.

The Web as we have it in these respects is very much Animal Farm and 1984. There appears to be little thought leadership from the major stakeholders in this regard. People like Tim Berners-Lee are asking for change (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2012JanMa...), but the new incumbents don't seem to want to see.