I believe I recall quake 3 running in the browser a few years before 2014. I imagine if we had the technology to run that, we had what was needed to render a wysiwyg UI editor with multiple cursors.
> No native apps had collaboration that smooth either.
Games have generally been way ahead of business apps in this sense.
Figma is a good product and being in the browser was a huge booster for its adoption but as a product, technically it could have existed 15 years ago as an installable program. With the same success? Probably not.
What made those products boom was cheap and qualitative video calls (so, bandwidth) that are totally necessary to work in real time collaboration.
Figma comes to mind as an obvious standout example. We didn’t even have the technology to support that level of multiplayer computationally heavy UI in the browser back in 2014. No native apps had collaboration that smooth either.
Collaborative [text] document editing in general is a good example. So mundane these days in all the big web-based work apps that we don’t even notice it anymore.