Comment by treyd

> assembler language and machine instructions

Except no we're not, new processors bring along new features and drop/discourage old ones, on x86 they even run in different modes depending on requirements, and compilers can choose to target specifically new ones and drop support for older processors without them. This isn't a valid comparison.

I think it's a bad thing because even though "you can do anything" it doesn't mean you can do it well because the web was always designed to be narrow and restricted for privacy/security reasons. That's good, but there's large classes of applications (chat clients, music players, image editors, etc) where that shouldn't be an issue and the costs of running in a web-like environment. Which, even if you drop the security features, manifests as worse UX to users due to the layers of indirection you're dealing with between the developer and the host OS.