We need both - some kinds of applications need direct hardware access. But the kernel attack surface is huge, even with seccomp and friends.

An app on my smartphone or - much worse - an Electron app "sandboxed" in a flatpak on my desktop has access to far wider range of dangerous APIs than a web application. What's wrong with a browser as a high-level OS?

It's mostly the layering that bothers me.

I don't mind Chrome OS and love my chromebook.

Some of this is aesthetic so I don't really expect to change minds, but if we lived in the world of "Life and Death of Javascript" and booted to some kind of Web OS I'd be annoyed at the loss of low level hackibility and get over it.

Booting to Linux, then booting a browser to get to a normal app that doesn't need network connectivity "feels" wrong.

Booting to Linux is just because Google did not want to start from scratch.

If they took a Xerox approach, ChromeOS would have a tiny mikrokernel, hypervisor type 1 style, and jump directly into Chrome.

I agree, I'd like it if all app platforms were portable, secure, and linkable by default. Given that they aren't, my allegiance is with the web.

A reasonable view.

I value discoverability and comprehensibility of the underlying platform a bit more, and have recognized that isn't likely to happen any time soon.

We had Java....