What does one (CSS tech) even have to do with the other (competition in the 'browser space')?

And I believe the OP is right. Keep people busy working with changes that don’t move the needle, each of the three large platforms wants to lock in the serious use cases into their native apps.

This is a phenomenon that dates back to IBM doing this in the 60s-70s-80s.

The assertion is that the major browser owners (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla) don't want competition, so they keep CSS complicated.

All four of these companies are members of the CSS Working Group. So the ability to do this is within their power.

You control the browser, you control the ad experience, the use data, etc.

It's unclear to me what an App Store has to do with anything. (Microsoft does have an app store, by the way. https://apps.microsoft.com/home?hl=en-US&gl=US )

Web of applications is a novel idea if executed well, but imo just download the executable and use the package manager to update it, and we still have the internet for communication, there's no need for a pseudo OS on top of the OS, if you want sandboxing and a VM do what they did with Java. The modern Web is unnecessary, everything that needs JS or frameworks is because of the retardation in the initial primitive design of the WWW and html, everything could have been implemented in a new xml markup akin to htmx, they were steering to that with their ideas in XHTML2 but never finished because of oppositions from Google et al. Other things like implementing an office suit or playing games in the browser is incompatible with the WWW, and like I said you better go and make a better platform for that.

Today it's simple to write your own OS than make a web browser, which contradicts everything about the web being decentralized and a protocol, what's the difference then if we would send propriety bytecode to this VM called the modern web instead of html et al? Sure you can still use and support a subset, and because of that I mentioned this idea as the first sentence, but this is the trick of EEE; the majority would bite the propriety extended conveniences and make it the new standard, then they would constantly extended until it becomes a game of resources which they have the higher hand in.

Some would say it's opensource and anyone can implement it, that's half the truth when it's so complex and grand that only *big* corporations can handle it, and that the WHATWG confessed that the real standard became the source code of the big 3: chromium, webkit, and gecko.

Those that believe this is some kind of "tinfoil hat bs" and there's no conspiracy are worse than those that believe everything is a conspiracy; because at least the latter would be right once, while the former are never right. I didn't mention also how the new web makes it easier for their spyware, but that's obvious. The web was about decentralization and standardization, but they skillfully made it the literal opposite.

It would have been the application platform people ask for, with a separate namespace for application-related tags so you can just switch them up with the OS's native UI controls.

Instead of that, we got Yet Another VM, WebAssembly.

Never mind that when Microsoft licensed Java from Sun for IE3 and IE4, Sun sued Microsoft. Sun wanted to be the only distributor of Java, just like Adobe was with Flash. So, browsers wouldn't have actually included a Java runtime out of the box without licensing/paying Sun for it. I'm sure that dependency would have only gotten even better under Oracle.

Those of us old enough to remember the web with plugins, don't miss plugins.

I don't necessarily like the JVM, it's just the most popular system-independent bytecode virtual machine (and historically plausible). It's a lot easier to built a bytecode interpreter than a full language. As mentioned elsethread, Scheme would have been even better, with an even smaller base.

XHTML, however, full in. Namespaces and syntax checking alone would have been worth it.

> Never mind that when Microsoft licensed Java from Sun for IE3 and IE4, Sun sued Microsoft.

Microsoft was in their peak EEE era, no wonder Sun didn't want to do anything with that.

> Those of us old enough to remember the web with plugins, don't miss plugins.

That's why I didn't mention plugins, browsers would have a JVM engine, instead of a JS one.

Think of how truly horrendous it would be if every browser had the JVM built in and Oracle was calling the shots on the language the whole web is written on? How much would they be charging for a license?