I've been wondering whether it's time to reserve browsers for their original purpose of reading documents and move web applications to a different paradigm: perhaps native controls/windows rendered and controlled by cross-platform markup served over the web, running on a "headless" sandbox. Perhaps a bit like React Native, but JIT compiled on the client. Not sure if this already exists. I'd really like to have native UI controls back for applications.
If they hadn’t fumbled the UI framework, and to a lesser extent the language design, you’re effectively describing .Net’s original role in the MS ecosystem and their play for web dominance.
JIT compiling, native graphics, quick and easy online deployment into sandboxes, support for desktop standards like keypresses, etc.
It feels like the web ate up the windows desktop experience instead of that experience spreading cross-platform and dominating.
Ah no I was just being snarky and not at you. We're all missing (hyper)text markup language as the UI markup layer, plus js. We previously had some kind of alternative "load app from internet" but the runtimes were external (and provided lots of fun security holes).
I completely agree it would be better to rethink what we want and have markup/code/etc optimised to the task of rendering applications. I don't think it'll happen unfortunately.
Java applets drove native widgets in their first iteration. It wasn't markup but that hardly matters, you could have easily slapped some XML over AWT and the difference between a .jar and a .js isn't big.
They had to stop because native widgets aren't secure enough.
