> Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. During the Dot-Com / Web 1.0 era, Javascript was an afterthough

> Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. During the Dot-Com / Web 1.0 era, Javascript was an afterthought, and the naming after Java was a careless mistake. In the 2000's decade, Google in its wisdom decided to make Javascript in the browser a first-priority effort, and they threw money at the best optimizing compiler engineers they could get their hands on. This settled a long-running debate in the industry over how client/server computing would work, that is, do you keep the UI logic on the server or push it to the client (this goes all the way back to the async vs. "intelligent" terminal debate in the 80's). The Web 2.0 / Cloud Computing era would not be what it is, except for Google deciding to make Chrome a first-class client platform, not just a trivial hypertext document viewer. The first thing people noticed was Google Maps, but that was just the tip of a much deeper iceberg. Most of what you are complaining about came later. Web 2.0 begat social media, which turned into a new form of television (i.e., scrolling your IG feed to look at mindless T&A). For a while I was optimistic about the gaming explosion fueling the development of GPU technology, but then that turned into Crypto and so-called "Web 3.0" so now we're back to cynical again. But I do like that the average affordable laptop these days will still have a strong onboard GPU, even if I only use it to play retro 80's video games using emulation. That still makes me happy.