That won't meaningfully change performance at all. Browsers aren't slow because they have to make slow syscalls - they mostly don't. They are slow because web technologies themselves are slow, sometimes by design, sometimes because of security/abuse concerns, but often just because HTML & CSS are absolutely crap platform for interactive UIs, something they were never intended to be and retrofitting that doesn't result in a very efficiency stack.
> HTML & CSS are absolutely crap platform for interactive UIs
I mostly disagree. HTML is great for plain forms, that seamlessly work at different form-factors (from mobile to desktop) with very little work. Browsers are also good at graphical outputs.
Browsers can fall down when you need rich, complex, or custom inputs: because virtual keyboards are very different from real keyboards (iOS especially poor), and touch is very different from mouse, and game consoles are something else again!
But we go where the users are, which is usually a wide variety of devices which makes browser based deployment the default choice, so you work within the limitations of browsers.
I'm not sure I'd call that an "interactive UI" though as that's pretty much a static layout. Which yes HTML is fine at handling.
> Browsers are also good at graphical outputs.
They're okay graphical outputs, not good ones. The feature sets are good, but the performance is all over the place and pretty much always sub-par as they are very defensive against content. Meaning the difference between the fast path (so plain scrolling) and the "slow" path (nearly anything else) is absolutely massive. Even things that are all but free on native toolkits, like just animating a color, can tank browser performance.
> But we go where the users are
Of course, which is mobile apps ;)
No but the point is just browsers aren't slow because they are an OS inside an OS. The layering isn't the cause of really any problems other than the binary size of the browser itself.
I have seen this attitude on HN before, and it really confuses me.
You know what an OS is, right? You can't just say, "the browser window is the only window" and say that "is" the OS. At some point some native code is going to need to send bits back and forth between hardware. You will need to provide a filesystem, you will need to provide device drivers, you will need to provide a windowing system, etc etc.
By the time you get from NAND to usable browser, you will have build an OS. Sure, I guess you could throw in a JS runtime and insist all user level software is in node/HTML/CSS, but there is still an OS underneath all that! (And the OS isn't why it's slow anyway.) There is so, so much more to computers than running JS and rendering HTML and CSS.
better yet we should just outlaw personal computers and laptops, they are causing too much trouble. Better for everyone to just have iPads and iPhones, kill Android too.
