The web has solved these things: it's an open standard which any serious device maker must support to be taken seriously. It can load applications in a relatively safe sandbox on demand. And it does all this with tremendous backwards compatibility that even 90s Microsoft would be envious of.
You're absolutely right Chrome is a virtualized operating system, but that's what it takes to be open and cross platform. Designing a better platform is the easy part; getting it to cross the chasm where it has first class device vendor support on a majority of platforms is the practically insurmountable part. I'm not saying it can't happen, but I don't think any organized group of humans has the power to do it intentionally.
Chrome is not a virtualized OS, it has become a mega-plugin similar to Java or Flash, except with better but still insufficient security. As more of the platform services are exposed to the internet, we'll start seeing new and interesting exploits, such as tracking users based on battery status and attacks on the local network (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12406310).
Yes, the stack is a mess! I am hopeful that Web Assembly will make things better.
How many more lines of code do you think it'll take for chrome to feel fast and light again? Is it possible to achieve that by adding code, forever? And then to work around all the cruft in browsers we have frameworks like react - conceptually beautiful but which do layout by diffing thousands of DOM elements through javascript.
The stack is a mess, and I don't see any direction it can possibly go but fatter, bigger and uglier than ever before. Forever. Surprisingly, this is a fate native apps have avoided. And in avoiding that fate new laptops have amazing battery life and work great. Well, until you open chrome or slack that is.
> Customers don't install apps for the most part. Why try to solve for that?
I don't write code for customers. I do it because as a kid I fell in love with the craft. I just... didn't fall in love with programming for this. Nope nope nope I want off the train before I throw up.