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While I agree with you, there’s a reason the current application environments are targeting web rendering engines, it’s cheaper for development. Why develop 3-4 different applications when you can develop 1 with hardly any extra effort?

Chromium is a huge boon to developers for this reason. Now there could have been a different history here. Apple after acquiring NeXT had also gotten OpenStep, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep . OpenStep was a cross platform UI development kit, even the web could be a target. Apple decided (possibly for good reasons, hard to argue with success) to kill this off. But, they had toyed with it, https://www.macrumors.com/2007/06/14/yellow-box-seems-to-exi... . So, Apple had effectively what Chromium has become. A cross-platform development and runtime environment.

Would things be different today if that wasn’t killed off? Would Apple have never come back from the brink of death to become the behemoth it is today, because it would have starved its own platforms? One thing you might have had is a cross-platform “native” UI platform, and that might have meant faster more efficient UIs like you want now.

Shoutout to GNUStep trying to keep the dream alive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep

Follow up question: maybe with Apple being so successful, now they could revive this and make it profitable for themselves, rather than starving their own platforms?



The good news is this means if we make browsers & JS rendering faster, everything gets faster.

The bad news is that doesn't seem likely to happen.




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