I think a more radical departure is needed. It&#x27;s about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than &quot;webpages.&quot;<p>Web browsers have more or less become mini operating systems, running elaborate virtual machines. There&#x27;s way too much complexity for everyone involved — from web devs and browser devs to the users and the people who maintain the standards, then there&#x27;s the devs who have to make native clients for the web apps — just to deliver products that don&#x27;t have half the power of OS-native software. Everyone has to keep reinventing the wheel, like with WebAssembly, to fix problems that don&#x27;t have to be there in the first place, not anymore:<p>Thanks to smartphones, people are already familiar with the modern concept of the standalone app; why not just make downloading an OS-native binary as easy as typing in a web address, on every OS?<p>Say if I press Cmd+Space on a Mac and type &quot;Facebook&quot; in Spotlight, it immediately begins downloading the native OS X Facebook app. The UI would be described in a format that can be incrementally downloaded, so the experience remains identical to browsing  the web, except with full access to the OS&#x27;s features, like an icon in the Dock and notifications and everything.<p>TL;DR: Instead of investing resources in browser development, Android&#x2F;iOS&#x2F;OSX&#x2F;Windows should just work on a better standard mechanism to deliver native apps instead.