No. We did, it is the browser.

"The Browser" has turned out to be a pretty terrible application API, IMO. First, which browser? They are all (and have been) slightly different in infuriating ways going all the way back to IE6 and prior. Also, a lot of compromises were made while organically evolving what was supposed to be "a system for displaying and linking between text pages" into a cross-platform application and system API. The web's HTML/CSS roots are a heavy ball and chain for applications to carry around.

It would have been great if browsers remained lightweight html/image/hyperlink displayers, and something separate emerged as an actual cross-platform API, but history is what it is.

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jstanley 5 hours ago | parent [-]

They're not that different, and it's a pretty good platform and pretty easy to program for. That's why it won.

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irishcoffee 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It didn't win. It just survived long enough. The web is a terrible platform. I haven't ever shipped a line of "web code" for money and I plan to keep it that way until I retire. What a miserable way to make a living.

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jstanley 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Perhaps you're taking the npm/react/vercel world to be the entire web? I agree that that stuff is a scourge. But you can still just write html and Javascript and serve it from a static site, I wrote an outline in https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/web-programs.html which I frequently link to coding agents when they are going astray.

	▲	irishcoffee 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When I was a kid I was running websites with active forums and a real domain name, and I did it with vBulletin and my brain. Someone bought the domain name and website off of me, haven't touched web tech since. I did use Wt at an old job once, but the "website" was local to 1 machine and there were no security concerns.