I don't think networked X11 is quite the web we'd want (it's really outdated), but it does seem better than browsers, which as you point out are so bad you want to stab your eyes out. Unfortunately, now that the web has scaled up to this enormous size, people can't un-see it and it does seem like it's seriously polluted our thinking about how the Internet should interact with end users.
Maybe the trick is something close to this: we need an Internet where it's very easy to do not only WYSIWYG document composition and publishing (which is what the web originally was, minus the WYSIWYG), but really deliver any kind of user experience we want (like VR, for example). It should be based on a network OS (an abstract, extensible microkernel on steroids) where user experiences of the network are actually programs with their own microkernel systems (sort of like an updated take on postscript). The network OS can security check the interpreters and quota and deal out resources and the microkernels that deliver user experiences like documents can be updated as what we want to do changes over time. I think we'd have something more in this direction (although I'm sure I missed any number of obvious problems) if we were to actually pass Alan Kay's OS-101 class as an industry.
We actually sort of very briefly started heading in this direction with Marimba's "Castanet" back at the beginning of Java and I was WILDLY excited to see us trying something less dumb than the browser. Unfortunately, it would seem that economic pressures pushed Marimba into becoming a software deployment provider, which is really not what I think they were originally trying to do. Castanet should have become the OS of the web. I think Java still has the potential to create something much better than the web because a ubiquitous and very mature virtual machine is a very powerful thing, but I don't see anyone trying go there. There's this mentality of "nobody would install something better." And yet we installed Netscape and even IE...
BTW, I do think the security problems of running untrusted code are potentially solvable (at least so much as any network security problems are) using a proper messaging microkernel architecture with the trusted resource-accessing code running in one process and the untrusted code running in another. The problem with the Java sandbox (so far as I understand all that) is that it's in-process. The scary code runs with the trusted code. In theory, Java is controlled enough to protect us from the scary code, but in practice, people are really smart and one tiny screw-up in the JVM or the JDK and bad code gets permissions it shouldn't have. A lot of these errors could be controlled or eliminated by separating the trusted code from the untrusted code as in Windows NT (even if only by making the protocol for resource permissions really clear).
Maybe the trick is something close to this: we need an Internet where it's very easy to do not only WYSIWYG document composition and publishing (which is what the web originally was, minus the WYSIWYG), but really deliver any kind of user experience we want (like VR, for example). It should be based on a network OS (an abstract, extensible microkernel on steroids) where user experiences of the network are actually programs with their own microkernel systems (sort of like an updated take on postscript). The network OS can security check the interpreters and quota and deal out resources and the microkernels that deliver user experiences like documents can be updated as what we want to do changes over time. I think we'd have something more in this direction (although I'm sure I missed any number of obvious problems) if we were to actually pass Alan Kay's OS-101 class as an industry.
We actually sort of very briefly started heading in this direction with Marimba's "Castanet" back at the beginning of Java and I was WILDLY excited to see us trying something less dumb than the browser. Unfortunately, it would seem that economic pressures pushed Marimba into becoming a software deployment provider, which is really not what I think they were originally trying to do. Castanet should have become the OS of the web. I think Java still has the potential to create something much better than the web because a ubiquitous and very mature virtual machine is a very powerful thing, but I don't see anyone trying go there. There's this mentality of "nobody would install something better." And yet we installed Netscape and even IE...
BTW, I do think the security problems of running untrusted code are potentially solvable (at least so much as any network security problems are) using a proper messaging microkernel architecture with the trusted resource-accessing code running in one process and the untrusted code running in another. The problem with the Java sandbox (so far as I understand all that) is that it's in-process. The scary code runs with the trusted code. In theory, Java is controlled enough to protect us from the scary code, but in practice, people are really smart and one tiny screw-up in the JVM or the JDK and bad code gets permissions it shouldn't have. A lot of these errors could be controlled or eliminated by separating the trusted code from the untrusted code as in Windows NT (even if only by making the protocol for resource permissions really clear).