zlacker

All those things you're complaining about existed in the past in the form of applets, flash scripts, and activex. They were way worse than a bunch of web* standards.

As for curated/opinionated, most people don't want to be power users. Most people never did it was just in the 90s you had little choice. If you want to be a power user today the options are still there.

>>sanswo+(OP)
applets were largely unused and flash was mostly used for ads, neither of which were even remotely as huge and gross as the chromium codebase.

nowadays you have many "desktop" applications bundling their own special build of chrome just because developers are so lazy(and I'd say many severely lacking critical judgement) they feel like taking their webapp and deploying as a "desktop" application.

The situation is infinitely much worse than it was in 1995.