Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police".
It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are not able or willing to provide a safe "native" sandbox completely uncoupled from curated app stores.
The ability of a browser to be a document viewer with a very limited layout system should be implemented in an optional layer on top of a bare bones browser.
Again, this should all be provided by the underlying operating systems (click an URL and instantly run cross-platform applications in a safe sandbox), but for some reason we didn't get that. It's the same with Electron apps by the way, those wouldn't exist if operating systems would come with cross-platform UI frameworks that are actually better than the unholy mix of HTML+CSS+JS. But Microsoft, Apple etc... had decades to get their act together without delivering.
It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are not able or willing to provide a safe "native" sandbox completely uncoupled from curated app stores.
The ability of a browser to be a document viewer with a very limited layout system should be implemented in an optional layer on top of a bare bones browser.
Again, this should all be provided by the underlying operating systems (click an URL and instantly run cross-platform applications in a safe sandbox), but for some reason we didn't get that. It's the same with Electron apps by the way, those wouldn't exist if operating systems would come with cross-platform UI frameworks that are actually better than the unholy mix of HTML+CSS+JS. But Microsoft, Apple etc... had decades to get their act together without delivering.