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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder what it would be like if the browser was just a thin virtual machine, something like Java had hoped to become, and then you could specify the components you wanted to run on top of that. If, for example, you are serving an HTML document, you could point the browser to also download the WebKit renderer, or whatever. If you're building something more akin to an application, you might use some other framework to host your application.

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That's certainly been discussed many times. It's an interesting concept. The main downside though is that if each site has its own renderer, with no shared concepts like the current web has, then you lose out on things like easily making accessibility tools, web scraping, etc. etc.

The benefits are also clear though, basically not being limited to current standards.

People have been parroting this nonsense for years. You have WebGL etc in the browser now. Web "pages" aren't pages anymore, and there is no way to enforce semantically meaningful markup. All that's been accomplished by fighting against the future is to ensure that all these low level services were implemented poorly. You can have all your high-level, common concepts but they need to be built onto a layered system. What we have now is a laughable mess, and it proves that the browser vendors have no idea what they're doing.

Of course then Google would have you download Webkit as a renderer and NaCl as an execution environment. Which would be only available on the latest version of your OS.

And Apple would shove some Obj-C renderer down your device, only this would support only iOS, MacOS and Windows, not Android and certainly not Linux.

FOSS-Shops would transmit only a repackaged build system which then would start downloading source packages and start compiling them in your browser. 3min later and you could actually start using the application.

I really fail to see the advantage here.

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