It's not good, just better than anything else. If things like running apps over an x-display server didn't totally suck, then the clients would have been adopt

It's not good, just better than anything else. If things like running apps over an x-display server didn't totally suck, then the clients would have been adopted and eventually it would be zero install. God didn't command that browsers be installed everywhere. Companies and users did so of their own free will. Maybe I haven't dug deep enough, but what are these alternative, non-hacky delivery platforms that the world passed up in favor of the web? The ones I've heard about have tons of problems, just like browsers.