Well, that's my point. The modern purpose of the browser is for applications, and for very good reasons, namely to abstract away the OS. The problem is that the design of the browser is for documents, and is really unsuitable for applications. Applications need a UI toolkit that takes a rectangle and renders the button, whatever into it. But you can't even get a proper rectangle with DOM: a div is 100% width, which is usually not what you want, but a span is this strange thing that makes sense for text, but not for a button or slider. So everything has "display: inline-block;", which then overrides the div or span part, so that it doesn't even matter which you pick. You can't even center something vertically without doing a web search, although I guess these days you use flexbox. Flexbox at least is the equivalent of Qt or Swing's layouts.
Mind you, I think WASM is the best thing that has happened to the browser, but that's because I think the HTML/DOM is completely unsuitable for apps, and I hate developing with it so much that I won't do it, even if I have to switch careers.
I think WASM is a reasonable start to a proper virtual machine. But I think what we need is a "browser" that presents a virtual machine with a virtual monitor(s), virtual chunk of contiguous memory, virtual CPU(s), virtual networking, virtual filesystem, and basic drawing primitives, that executes WASM. The "browser" part would be that you can use a URL to point to a WASM program. The program would see itself as being the only thing on the machine (see, basically generalization of the OS process concept into a machine). The user would be able to put limits on what the virtual network can access, what parts of the OS filesystem the virtual filesystem could access, how many real CPUs (and a cpulimit) the virtual CPUs get, etc. So, sort of like a containerized Plan9. I would be happy to do this myself, but I just don't have the spare time to do it, so unless someone is willing to fund me, I'll hope someone sees this and catches the vision.
Mind you, I think WASM is the best thing that has happened to the browser, but that's because I think the HTML/DOM is completely unsuitable for apps, and I hate developing with it so much that I won't do it, even if I have to switch careers.
I think WASM is a reasonable start to a proper virtual machine. But I think what we need is a "browser" that presents a virtual machine with a virtual monitor(s), virtual chunk of contiguous memory, virtual CPU(s), virtual networking, virtual filesystem, and basic drawing primitives, that executes WASM. The "browser" part would be that you can use a URL to point to a WASM program. The program would see itself as being the only thing on the machine (see, basically generalization of the OS process concept into a machine). The user would be able to put limits on what the virtual network can access, what parts of the OS filesystem the virtual filesystem could access, how many real CPUs (and a cpulimit) the virtual CPUs get, etc. So, sort of like a containerized Plan9. I would be happy to do this myself, but I just don't have the spare time to do it, so unless someone is willing to fund me, I'll hope someone sees this and catches the vision.
Using WASM in the web browser is a workaround.