When Chrome came along, the dominant browser was Internet Explorer 7. It had been out for two years when Chrome 1.0 was released. Before IE7, the world ran IE6 for five years. Web development was largely stagnant. That was the world that Chrome came into.
Before DRM support was added to browsers, you needed to install plugins to watch protected content. Despite what detractors might think, the content producers were never going to go YOLO and release their content without any protection. There are a lot of us that are happy that we can watch Netflix, Prime or whatever in our browsers.
That a ton of desktop apps use Electron is an indictment of the state of native toolkit. Saying that Fuchsia is highly dependent on Flutter is like saying Linux is highly dependent on GTK. With that said, maybe your crystal ball on the future of Fuchsia isn't so clear.
The alternatives have no chance in doing anything about it. Firefox is entirely dependent on Google for funding (and has been for years), Microsoft recently switched to Chromium for Edge and Safari is again years behind (Just like IE.). There are only really two competitors here. (Apple and Google once again!)
So let's sit back and just watch Google continuously adding more superfluous features into the Web like Web(USB, Bluetooth, NFC, etc) and the web-devs will force you to use Chrome again (which indirectly helps Electron apps); leaving the rest of the non-Chromium browsers in the dust.
> Saying that Fuchsia is highly dependent on Flutter is like saying Linux is highly dependent on GTK.
False equivalence.
You're the one that just compared a kernel with full operating system. Oh dear. I'm definitely sure that the device in the article is running Flutter right now.
> With that said, maybe your crystal ball on the future of Fuchsia isn't so clear.
Given that Fuchsia also has the intention of running unmodified Android apps as well, my crystal ball could not be any more clearer of its future. Perhaps you getting confused on your last sentence was an indication that your crystal ball has just malfunctioned.
There's a massive difference. Back then you had a single company that kinda-sorta didn't care about the web. They already had an application platform they were happy with. There wasn't really an incentive for them to evolve it once they had the dominant position. The web was stagnating for years.
Nowadays we actually have multiple players that are very active in the development of the web. The situation is not at all comparable.
> So let's sit back and just watch Google continuously adding more superfluous features into the Web like Web(USB, Bluetooth, NFC, etc) and the web-devs will force you to use Chrome again
Superfluous to you. If developers are using it, then it's obviously filling some need. What do you say to developers who are asking for those features? "Sorry, that's not compatible with my idea of what the web is. Go write a {Windows,Linux,MacOs} application and tell your users to download it".
It always comes back to this. People want progress in the areas they care about, but no progress in other areas.
Firefox is getting irrelevant and the latest news show their focus isn't surely in turning the tide, UI revamp, really?
Since Chrome came along, the 'Web' became less free from the start and the moment Google forked WebKit (called Blink) to use it in their own browser, it has turned the web more into a walled garden each time apps use specific Chrome features and it is getting worse. Even in that early decade, we knew about how Google and others were tracking us since the PRISM program leaks.
Later DRM was added with reasons and votes unknown, devs have to keep telling users to switch from any other browser to Chrome to use their apps and now this forked engine is in tons of Electron apps with Microsoft jumping in and using it in their Edge browser. The time to complain was 10 years ago and now it is almost too late.
Now Google is doing it again with Fuchsia which will eventually replace ChromeOS and Android. Fuchsia is highly dependent on Flutter and those apps will run on Fuchsia devices on day 1. There is an extremely low chance of that being abandoned so I'm afraid it will continue.