>Screw this, it's 2AM and tomorrow I have to work to pay a mortgage. Have fun, you silly kids.

Sorry, my comment ended up being more aggressive than i wanted, and i apologize. But I really do want to keep having a bit of a discussion without it dissolving to insults. Clearly we both think we are right, and i'm curious where the disconnect is.

>... except the ones that were built exactly for the purpose of being sandboxed VMs: java applets, flash, mobile apps etc.

But most of those are gone now (or at least gone from "popular" usage, and for good reason), and while mobile apps are still around and aren't going anywhere they aren't nearly as locked down as something like a web app is. When comparing mobile apps and web apps, i'm not saying one is better than the other, just that they are different.

>The browser might have more prompts now simply because Microsoft showed everyone how not to do it with ActiveX, but it was not designed that way.

Then current browsers were designed with more prompts... Maybe not from version 0, but their current versions are designed to have them.

>That's staggering ignorance, sorry. Why do you think you have groups like "cdrom" in Linux?

Now i'm not nearly as knowledgeable about linux as i should be, but I thought those groups all had to do with file access. I've installed applications and had them access GPS hardware, cameras, microphones, and more without a single prompt on multiple linux platforms (as well as windows). Is there something i'm missing there, or were my systems just not configured correctly?

>No, that's exactly "web development" as you understand it (i.e. building "apps"), just on previous iterations.

But again, that's like comparing current desktop/server application development with x86 real mode applications. Yeah, that was how it was done in the past, but it's not how it's done now. I agree with the rest of that statement though, JS was pretty awful, but it's grown significantly and I wouldn't call current day JS bad by any means. It definitely has it's warts (more than many other languages, but it is extremely capable and it's becoming a language i reach for more often than not. Once people successfully started writing non-trivial server side code in JS instead of alternatives that argument kind of goes out the window IMO.

>No, in most cases they are simply accidents of history like XMLHttpRequest.

I wouldn't call XMLHttpRequest an accident. It was designed to allow script access to Http Requests... And then it was adopted by other browser vendors because it was great functionality. There were mistakes in web development and javascript (like automatic semicolon insertion making it's way into the standard), but things like XMLHttpRequest wasn't one of them.

>No, the web has mutated in an application platform. Big difference.

Regardless of the terminology that you want to use, it is an application platform, and a very capable and secure one. It's far from perfect and it is still rapidly changing, but arguing about how awful it was in the past isn't going to make anyone's lives better. Like the linked article is saying, let's try to work on making sure that things get better in the future. Personally, I really like the direction everything is heading (with only a few exceptions).