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> It is easy to imagine something much better, where your code runs on a nice tidy runtime native to the OS

Yeah, cause that's how every native platform has been since the begining. Yet the web still needed to be invented. Why?

The biggest reason is probably that you don't need the user to explicitly download and install your app. Also, a web app works on all the major OSes with a single GUI environment. And then of course the fact that webapps run in a more secure sandbox. A standard cross API and sandbox could potentially solve the second two. But I'm not sure how to solve the first outside of a browser.

Because no two platforms can agree on anything so now we have "hosted platforms."

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