[aaaronic]

Web browsers in particular have become operating systems unto themselves. The "modern web" has so many features, often implemented in half a dozen competing ways... Just text rendering on modern hardware can be a HUGE lift.

Modern toolchains are all about "not reinventing the wheel" -- but when each dependency has picked a different version of said wheel, just pulling in a few dependencies leads to 6 different implementations of the same low-level features.

[chankstein38]

This is one of the reasons the announcements about WebGPU made me cringe. Yeah, just what I need, more unnecessary complexity added to webpages. Especially when there's seemingly a chance people will use them to mine crypto on my GPU while I'm on their page.