> This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software.

You can try to close the door on that stable, but the horse that escaped has died of old age it's happened so long ago.

Says who? This sounds more like preaching than anything else.

Blame the OS vendors (Microsoft has 70% of the blame, Apple 25% and even Linux distro share a 5% amongst themselves).

They killed[1] cross platform apps and they made software updates hard, so everyone just flocked to the web.

[1] Not through a single blow, death by a million cuts.

>They killed[1] cross platform apps

No they didn't! Extremely lazy devs deciding that they should just be able to deploy javascript and html anywhere and using Electron "killed" native apps. Why would anyone ever invest even 1% more into a native app when you can just hire intern javascript kiddies, pay them terribly, oversee them with one or two expensive javascript bros, and all your users will blame the slowdown on the operating system and Microsoft as they always have?

Native apps cost far more than just 1% over web apps.

I'd argue each native version costs about as much as an web app.

The real shame was Gtk and Qt not getting the support they deserve.

>This is where everything has gone screwy

I, on the other hand, find that "browser as OS" is one of the best things that has happened in recent software history. I can run Photopea anywhere, on any platform that has a decent browser. Absolutely magic!

The web was invented in 1989, became a public project in 1991, and JavaScript support for it appeared in 1995, Java Applets the same year, with Flash and ActiveX following in 1996. So it was a static document model for ~6 years, and an app platform for ~27 years.

PDFs and work documents also were infected with scripting languages in the 90’s. It was just a weird time.