I agree with your diagnosis of browsers and with the idea of using local tools that interact using standard CRUD interfaces, I just don't see the filesystem part buying you anything over HTTP, which provides all that. I think it's a useless distraction at best, and a fatal flaw at worst.
I also disagree that the app-ification was an historical accident; I think it's the direct result of economical forces, and I'm not convinced that an alternative system could become popular while avoiding it.
Economics forces shape historic accidents too. That's very much part of my model.
You might want to look through the inspirations part of the doc to see what's prompted this. I've also turned up a number of similar projects after having started writing that essay.
But:
* The /proc and /sys filesystems on Linux
* The /net virtual filesystem on many Solaris systems, generally tying to an NFS network via automount.
* Various Plan 9 elements, including /webfs
* The Midnight Commander virtual filesystems, including remote access over ssh.
* SSHFS.
* Tools for on-demand and responsive media response. Tracking an element down to its source, and requesting, say, PDF or ePub rather than HTML might automatically provide those. The idea of being able to run, say, 'ls' on an HTML target and have it return a list of links rather than its full content.
* Unix mail, mailx, mutt, and especially mh, which provides a shell-based perspective to email management.
* Numerous document markup and preparation systems.
* Squid, dansguardian, Tor, and other Web proxy tools.
* Libraries and catalogs, generally.
* The Internet Archive.
* HTML doc "reader-mode" tools: Readability, Pocket, Instapaper, Outline.
* Search
Again: wiring much of this into the FS layer, abstracting away the browser, treating doc requests as queues, splitting up docs, media, apps, and commerce, integrating into the user's workflow rather than the publishers.
If it's not for you, that's fine. But that's where I'm coming from.
I also disagree that the app-ification was an historical accident; I think it's the direct result of economical forces, and I'm not convinced that an alternative system could become popular while avoiding it.