There was a lot of interesting technology in the 90s that made the bridge between the desktop world and the web world seem-less, Microsoft had a ton of internet integrated into desktop stuff but Mozilla had XPCOM, KDE had Khtml, Adobe had Flash, Java had Applets and a bunch of remote technologies.
I miss that sense of possibility you get from knowing your client side website could do anything.
Of course I can see some of the reasons it went away, security was a constant struggle, maintaining all of the integration points required a lot of developer effort which was being more focused on keeping up with web standards, mobile meant desktop and the web were not the only concerns, etc.
An interesting halfway point was the explosion in widget technologies in the mid-2000-ish time. Often these were web tech based and aimed at similar developers. I think the rise of mobile apps is what killed that one
All the people who used widgets as lazy SEO or injected ads/tracking once they were widespread helped kill widgets off. They had all the same problems as modern browser extensions, but no central authority to remove them.
I miss that sense of possibility you get from knowing your client side website could do anything.
Of course I can see some of the reasons it went away, security was a constant struggle, maintaining all of the integration points required a lot of developer effort which was being more focused on keeping up with web standards, mobile meant desktop and the web were not the only concerns, etc.
An interesting halfway point was the explosion in widget technologies in the mid-2000-ish time. Often these were web tech based and aimed at similar developers. I think the rise of mobile apps is what killed that one