"one where only a very very few players have control over the technological environment, one where humanity has no say, no stake, no control" Well, it's worth

"one where only a very very few players have control over the technological environment, one where humanity has no say, no stake, no control" Well, it's worth bearing in mind that what you call a standards based hypermedium is now completely unimplementable by anyone except Google, Apple and companies funded by Google. Insisting that everyone writes web apps doesn't mean software exists in some sort of communitarian utopia, it just means that it's the Chrome team that gets to decide how everything works. Like extensions for example, hence Manifest V3. There's no really deep reason Flutter or other toolkits can't support more interesting and powerful hackability than what web extensions allow. Look at the JVM - it's not the web, but with tools like JVM agents, JMX, classloaders and so on you can extensively modify apps that run on it even without source code access. That's how the Minecraft mod scene developed and it's why you can so easily write plugins for IntelliJ. After all, web pages aren't actually designed to be modified by extensions. It's usually a giant hack. They come with megabytes of minified JS and attempts to modify them frequently break or require constant maintenance. That's why there are relatively few extensions that see actual usage outside of ad blockers, the cost to keep them going is just too high. And that in turn is partly because web apps usually don't have any kind of plugin architecture comparable to what desktop apps have often provided. At best they might have some sort of Google Docs like store, where the web app developer gets to pick and choose what integrations are allowed, but nothing as open as something like Photoshop plugins or Office OLE objects, where the end user got to install things the original developers had never even imagined. So I reckon you're being kind of harsh here. HTML is hardly a technological utopia. Why shouldn't people try to do better? There's no reason progress and extension APIs have to be in tension.