Netscape was talking about making the Web an app platform to replace Microsoft Windows even way back then. The world we're living in today is exactly what they envisioned.
Electron wouldn’t be possible back then.
Electron was effectively invented by Microsoft in 1999:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
Which is funny, because HTML, Java, and JavaScript were being talked about as an app platform a few years before then, precisely to prevent Microsoft from drinking everybody's milkshake on the desktop.
JavaScript is innocent. The people writing humongous apps with it are the ones to blame. And memory footprint. A 16 MB machine wouldn’t be able to hold the icons an average web app uses today.