&gt; I think the 20-30 years of GUI exploration is coming up very empty handed<p>I think you are vastly overestimating the actual &quot;exploration&quot; that occurred over this time.<p>Windowing toolkits have <i>extremely</i> high barriers to entry as well as high networking effects.<p>The whole idea of a very hierarchical, single-threaded entity controlling all of your user interaction is very much anathema to modern CPU&#x27;s.  However, we are stuck with it because a new windowing toolkit would take a huge amount of effort.