Remember MS-DOS also succeeded because of its "strengths" in some very special, narrow sense. In the more ordinary sense, it succeeded in spite of its weakness, but Windows has slowly recovered from that and is now a good system.
The modern web is somewhat the the reverse: it is worse than its progenitor. HTML, HTTP and what would eventually be called ReST were all good ideas and succeeded because (a) they were a good way to put hyperlinked multimedia on the internet and (b) hyperlinked multimedia turned out to be the thing that masses of users wanted.
The subsequent effort to retrofit that and turn it into a zero-install software delivery platform is where all the insane hackery comes from; and the hacks that succeeded didn't have to be good. They are just what worked at the time with some combination of IE, Netscape and Flash.
If things like running apps over an x-display server didn't totally suck, then the clients would have been adopted and eventually it would be zero install. God didn't command that browsers be installed everywhere. Companies and users did so of their own free will.
Maybe I haven't dug deep enough, but what are these alternative, non-hacky delivery platforms that the world passed up in favor of the web? The ones I've heard about have tons of problems, just like browsers.
You mean the browser achieved it instead of the JVM. It could have been something other than JavaScript as the scripting language. What mattered was the platform everyone ended up using.
The modern web is somewhat the the reverse: it is worse than its progenitor. HTML, HTTP and what would eventually be called ReST were all good ideas and succeeded because (a) they were a good way to put hyperlinked multimedia on the internet and (b) hyperlinked multimedia turned out to be the thing that masses of users wanted.
The subsequent effort to retrofit that and turn it into a zero-install software delivery platform is where all the insane hackery comes from; and the hacks that succeeded didn't have to be good. They are just what worked at the time with some combination of IE, Netscape and Flash.