The WWW started out as a document sharing platform, and that has proven repeatedly to be a horrible base upon which to build an application platform. There's technological ugliness in the form of kludges like WebAssembly and WebSockets and WebGL that are (badly) re-inventing large parts of the operating system. There's the usability nightmares caused by trying to make a web application imitate a native UI (or worse, trying to use web technologies locally as a UI toolkit a la Electron). The addition of application-oriented features has detracted from the original feature set: gratuitous overuse of JS for stuff that can be done in CSS and HTML is rampant, leading to less responsive sites with worse accessibility and worse battery life. And sooner or later, every attempt to shoehorn a real security model onto the Web has fallen. Every month, the idea of a secure sandbox for running untrusted third-party code looks more and more like a pipe dream.

I fully understand how much the world has invested in making the web into an applications platform, and I recognize that many things of value have been built on that platform. But it's been a fundamentally flawed enterprise from the start, and the pitfalls are getting harder to ignore. We need to start taking seriously again the idea that untrusted code cannot be trusted. We need to stop re-inventing the operating system within the browser just because some programmers are too lazy to port their applications to more than one OS even when there are libraries to abstract away all the differences that don't require a UI redesign. We need to stop sacrificing so much efficiency for the sake of portability that doesn't live up to its purpose.

In order for a web browser suitable for document-oriented usage with limited interactivity to be secure and offer reasonable protections for your privacy, it has to take measures that preclude it from being a good applications platform. That conflict seems irreconcilable.