Actually no, Web was perfectly fine with HTML 4.01/XHTML, but then some people at browser teams decided to declare war on native apps, HTML 5 was born and we are a couple of years before ChromeOS takes it all.

I’d rather use and develop a PWA than a native app. So would all of my customers. iOS is the only thing holding them back. Usually we just wrap our web app in a native app for iOS and everybody is happy.

Could you be a little less cryptic?

Google is adding to Chrome all the missing APIs from ChromeOS, and folks keep using Electron instead of daemons alongside system browser or Web widgets.

So from point of view of world browser market share, Safari is the only browser strong enough between what is left of Web and ChromeOS platform.

I don't see how this helps or even relates to your point that "Web was perfectly fine with HTML 4.01/XHTML"

Obviously it wasn't. Folks keep using Electron, ChromeOS, Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari and the HTML5 APIs that are common to all of them. If you took away everything that didn't exist in HTML 4.01/XHTML the entire world would grind to a screeching halt.

Anyway, I don't see any problem with the Chrome taking on all the features of ChromeOS. Give me more features and higher quality for free, I'm not going to complain :)

Also, Microsoft Edge has more users than Safari on platforms that I care about and they're the ones I'm jumping ship to if Google tries to take away uBlock Origin.

When the world turns into a Chrome monoculture, there won't be Web any longer, job offers will turn into ChromeOS developer kind of ad.

Meh. Everybody ran Windows too, until they didn’t. Software moves too fast. Even the hegemony of Android and iOS which is even more bothersome to many, will be broken before long.

Also, Edge is not Chrome. So, you can always run that if you don’t like Safari or Firefox. And I really don’t see Edge Safari or Firefox going anywhere so double meh.

I'm not complaining about well sandboxed multi-platform multi-arch webapps. Better than running an app in Wine because the publisher doesn't care about supporting Linux.

Nicely packed in Chrome, then don't complain about Google taking it all.

That depends on what you consider fine. Modern decelopment is so much more productive, no way I could go back to the jquery days.

I seem to recall Flash being developed well before HTML5 along with ActiveX components and Java applets? People have been trying to embed "native like apps" into web pages for a long time, they certainly weren't just satisfied with plain html pages.

As means for easy distribution of native apps, and designers not wanting to dealing with the crap of doing Web design, which still hasn't been fixed in 2020, despite all attempts to make Web apps take on native apps UI engines.

So we're not talking about users anymore?

None of those things would've lasted if the users didn't use the things created. Flash enabled video in webpages, games in webpages all things users flocked too and enjoyed.

Maybe the whole web and browser game is not sustainable were it not for ads and bloat

Native mobile apps are doing just fine, from monetary point of view.

I take it you don't remember Flash and how popular it was.

Users are losing representation in web standards meetings while Microsoft and Google are having more say.

I would be surprised if users asked for battery level reporting, and various other modern web standards.

If Google introduced a “let website know I’m using phone on the toilet” service, I’m sure some people will claim in retrospect that users wanted it.

I’m not saying that users know everything they want. But the claim that those apis are there because users want them is also false.