Morphing the web user agent into something akin to an X11 server made total sense to me when I started doing such in 2000. If we developers had demanded a true distributed windows system, then we would have been spared this bag of hurt.

I remember demoing the Andrew Window Manager to colleagues in 1989 and them feeling like they had glimpsed the future. Alas, that future never came.

https://mirrors.nycbug.org/pub/The_Unix_Archive/Unix_Usenet/...