Exactly. They fucked up something that someone else had thought up.
> when you say, "the browser was not created to be an application runtime", really, I don't even know what that means. Which browser?
Pretty much none of them, except maybe IE (WebKit and Blink are not browsers, they are rendering engines, btw). Some were thought for read-write capabilities in pages (Amaya and to a degree the original Netscape suite with their built-in editor), but that's basically it. Netscape pivoted this and that way, as scrappy startups are wont to do, following random partnerships or shipping their own suite, until they were acquired by AOL. Whatever they say, they really had no big design; they just threw the kitchen sink at something they thought would be cool. It just so happened that eventually Apple and Google figured that the JS/HTML coupling made for their best bet to break Microsoft's dominance in the application space, and started throwing engineers at it. Without that move, JS would still be the rollover trick-pony that it was in the early '00s, with the wonky inconsistent syntax and horrendous performance.
The one browser that was really thought of as a runtime was basically IE, with ActiveX and its deep embedding into Windows. That was a bad idea and it rightly ended like it did.
Exactly. They fucked up something that someone else had thought up.
> when you say, "the browser was not created to be an application runtime", really, I don't even know what that means. Which browser?
Pretty much none of them, except maybe IE (WebKit and Blink are not browsers, they are rendering engines, btw). Some were thought for read-write capabilities in pages (Amaya and to a degree the original Netscape suite with their built-in editor), but that's basically it. Netscape pivoted this and that way, as scrappy startups are wont to do, following random partnerships or shipping their own suite, until they were acquired by AOL. Whatever they say, they really had no big design; they just threw the kitchen sink at something they thought would be cool. It just so happened that eventually Apple and Google figured that the JS/HTML coupling made for their best bet to break Microsoft's dominance in the application space, and started throwing engineers at it. Without that move, JS would still be the rollover trick-pony that it was in the early '00s, with the wonky inconsistent syntax and horrendous performance.
The one browser that was really thought of as a runtime was basically IE, with ActiveX and its deep embedding into Windows. That was a bad idea and it rightly ended like it did.