What does HackerNews think of awesome-web-desktops?

Palm Pre's webOS (2009) is the most famous. After an acquisition by HP (2010-2013), it was acquired by LG's (with patents going to Qualcomm). The only other major entrant, Firefox, was short lived (2014-2015). Chrome OS (2011-) only sort of counts; I don't think the OS chrome is using Chrome, just the same underlying drawing libraries, but it does run webapps.

Before that was a neat Linux project Pyrodesktop (2007) which was an x11 window manager using Firefox guts to render. There was also a trend of trying to mate Javascript technologies to gnome back then, with efforts like gjs seeing some adoption. I don't know how popular it is, but a spinoff of css was/is used for styling in GNOME for a while.

These days there's tons of web desktop projects. https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops . Only sort of in the spirit but i quite adore Greenfield, an html5 Wayland desktop/compositor. https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

I absolutely think there is all-in potential for the web. I think we're missing a visible rallying point, where a stronger community of app makers can cooperatively advance beyond-the-web capabilities. Project Fugu & WICG help a lot but are also working with Safari (and sort of Firefox) handcuffed to them.

As a matter of fact there is [1] I'm personally curating it and check up on the links weekly.

[1] https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops

Thanks glad you liked it! There other "desktop environments" in the browser (https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-web-desktops), but I tried my best to be one of the more accurate/functional ones.