Saying that "React and friends" are the good thing you want (without Chrome) is kind of nuts. React is insanely bloated for what it is, and it's also highly dep

Saying that "React and friends" are the good thing you want (without Chrome) is kind of nuts. React is insanely bloated for what it is, and it's also highly dependent on the bloated browser (and especially Chrome). React Native is an intermediary layer between a work in progress VM and JavaScript. So, we can't win there. In a sense what we really want is for the browser to be an OS-level feature so that the browser-based-app is low cost, as is the case with chrome OS and you could argue was Microsoft's vision with IE. This is doable today if you write cross-browser code and wrap your web app in a platform-native web view, but then you lose the conveniences of Electron (cross-platform APIs to solve common problems such as menus) AND you have to deal with browser incompatibilities. All this to save RAM and 5% Of one CPU core. Perhaps in an ideal world we'd have a lightweight VM with nice JavaScript APIs. The immediate problem we run into is that really fundamental UI gadgets, such as styled text fields and canvases, are not implemented similarly on the platforms we care about (Windows, Mac, Gnome, Android say), so we have to reinvent that wheel and before you know it you have another bloated virtual machine, except this one isn't battle tested and it only exists three years in the future.