The difference between now and then is that people back then wanted bookmarks, search engines, CLIs, user preferences, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links and so forth. While some of us still do, the great mass of web users now just want TV on their smartphones: they want an attention-consumption device to distract them from real life.

Flash never took over because a lot of us then wanted our computers to work for us; Javascript and the read-only web are succeeding because so many now don’t mind being farmed for their attention.