When will web browsers be complete?

I felt the same with components.

I was using encapsulated components with internal state and defined interfaces more than two decades ago and it was old technology even then.

The web is a funny place, they grab something and claim it's revolutionary but often forget to mention where it came from.

It's not a bad thing but I have often joked if you want to see what is considered state of the art in Year X go see what the academics where doing in (X-20) years.

You could use the web before that, but with text based browsers which frankly weren't very inspiring nor popular. Most people preferred gopher etc - there was a brilliant mac gopher client.

What transformed the web was the launch of the Mosaic along with NCSA HTTPd - mostly in the backend of 1993 - it took off like wild fire - it's hard to remember dates, but I definitely remember the launch of Netscape Browser - which according to wikipedia was late 1994 - and at that point the web was already pretty popular.

Not just the web, but a large percentage of people had their own websites - it was ridiculously easy to do - just put an index.html in your ~/public_html folder.

Obviously this was all the in rarefied atmosphere of academia - and the computers were Unix work stations and most users were at University and largely PhD students at that.

The technology to let toddlers use the web didn't really exist until rather recently.

In 2003, we got broadband internet at our house. Before then, when we only had dial-up, only a single computer in the house could use the internet. Broadband internet brought with it external modems you could connect to via wifi rather than sitting inside your computer [1], and this meant you could use other devices than the primary family computer to browse the internet, even assuming you had more computers in your household than just the one.

The iPhone came out in 2007, and is generally credited with ushering in the smartphone revolution. The iPad came out in 2010, making a somewhat larger form factor to enable the touchscreen interaction with the computer. From observation of my 3-year-old nephew, his ability to meaningfully use the computer via keyboard and mouse is quite limited. And I'm not sure he's all that capable with the touchscreen; he still hasn't understood that the reason he can't see me is that my phone doesn't have a camera and tries pushing stuff on the phone to make the camera turn on, inevitably resulting in him pushing the "end call" button.

I can totally buy a 10-year-old in 2007 who had never used the internet, especially if they came from a poorer household that didn't have the ability to keep up with technology and lived in a school district that didn't have the ability to give all their kids laptops.

[1] This does also show my age, as I never experienced the age of external modems connected via serial cables.

Why plural? Probably "the web browser" is more correct term these days, no?

The idea of "browser as OS" or "OS as browser" is not that new. That move started by "active desktop" concept on Windows 95 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop).

And speaking about browser... It's main goal is to serve following tasks:

1. To provide safe browsing experience.

2. To present content to the user.

Note that the order of these two tasks matters.

Initial active desktop effort has died because order of these two tasks was wrong at their first attempt.

From that point of view, "browser as OS" just increases attack surface. And so more and more isolation layers will be added into browsers making them less effective and performant than alternatives.

Consider WebAssembly for example. That was desperate move to provide an option to run some computation-heavy code inside browsers with at least comparable speed of native code. But it always be slower than native solutions. Java vs native code, we've been there, seen that.

To be short: native OS and solutions will always be more performant than the one emulated in the browser. Just because of the order of tasks.

In this sense the browser will never be complete. It may become asymptotically close to the OS but will never reach that point. And note the price: on that way it will become asymptotically close to the size of OS.

And there we have another loop. From IE Shell to Blink/Chrome Shell. Who knows which dominating engine we will have in another 20 years.