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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

The inflection point was later. Significant client-side logic in javascript was not a thing until gmail and google maps showed the way in 2004/2005. Even then it wasn’t until jquery in 2006 that the ball really started rolling. The browser could do it in 2001, but it took half a decade for web development to catch up.

What can today’s browsers do that web development hasn’t caught up to?

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> What can today’s browsers do that web development hasn’t caught up to?

With WebGPU, WASM, WebXR, WebBluetooth, WebUSB, WebTransport and more already/soon enabled, I'm fairly sure we're just scratching the surface currently on what use cases can be built with today web technologies.

Also, things outside browsers are changing enough that the use cases also expand. Bandwidth, latency, availability and more are also improving, enabling fancy stuff we couldn't dream about some years ago. The other day one of the HN submissions loaded a multi-GB file for client-side evaluation of a Stable Diffusion model, as just one example.

100%. Now those technologies offer an independent platform way of having a new kind of "OS".

I agree. GMail and Google Maps showed a complete different web but XMLHttpRequest was needed for that and was a milestone even if there was no web app to show at that time.

We should also take into account that Flash [1] was the technology that ate the limitations of the web. Flash was really powerful. More in a moment with low bandwidths around the world. For example this late 90 animation would be impossible to stream [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

[2] http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html (SWF files) available for streaming in YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zeek+locomotion

> even if there was no web app to show at that time

Wasn't OWA ("Outlook Web Access") the web app that XMLHttpRequest was made for?

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