It's what Microsoft did with "HTA" back in the mid-1990s; this is nothing new. ...and we'll see a repeat of the problems it caused Microsoft back then trying t

It's what Microsoft did with "HTA" back in the mid-1990s; this is nothing new. ...and we'll see a repeat of the problems it caused Microsoft back then trying to improve Windows and Internet Explorer over time while still maintaining backwards-compatibility with a surprisingly large number of already-distributed HTAs (HTAs were popular for things like magazine CD demo-disk catalogs, computer hardware driver splash-screen GUIs, kiosk apps, that kind of thing - by 1998 if you didn't care about Netscape support you could take full-advantage of Trident (MSHTML)'s hacked-on support for parts of DirectX graphics (gradients, alpha-transparency, smooth animations) - the only alternative was VB5/VB6 and I think/hope it was obvious to everyone at the time that VB's days were numbered; and don't forget that Macromedia put decent effort into making Flash work well for standalone "Flash Projectors" - and you could embed SWFs in your HTA too; so this incredibly capatable HTML+CSS or HTML+Flash-based "interactive experiences" were expected to quickly become the standard for desktop multimedia. ...well, they didn't: instead .NET's WinForms (a marginal improvement over VB6) is still dominant for Windows fixed-size-window RAD GUIs, while HTAs started to suffer decline when XP shipped in 2001 because of the breaking-changes between IE4, IE5, and IE6 (hence even more hacks like Conditional Comments) - and security-folk sensibly reminded us that it was not a good idea for magazines/trade-shows/etc to distribute CD-ROM discs with autorun HTAs containing embedded ActiveX controls running under full-trust on every Windows machine from 95 to XP. Mozilla of 2024 needs to avoid repeating Microsoft's self-inflicted issues. ----- As for me? For now, I'd really rather just have a fork of the Blink layout engine that can run off XML and CSS and would be driven by something like a COM interface to the DOM - which means Blink doesn't need to bring its own JavaScript engine, which makes the system more secure - and means they'll finally be able to have a Blink-based page render that doesn't require 4 separate isolated processes consuming gigabytes of RAM (looking at you, GitKraken).