[ . . . . ] Browsers are more usable because they’re less flexible.
I think I’ve told this story before here, but it’s a good one; at a content management conference, a woman from the Tandem-that-was saying “It was so wonderful when the browser interfaces came on; the vendors had to discard all those stupid sliders and cascaded menus and eight-way toggles, and only leave the stuff that mattered.”
This is a well-thought-out view of the software development ecosystem. The stuff I excerpt above resonates with me, because I’ve said much the same thing many times. Tools that do everything can stunt creativity; they remove your incentive to think. You find either too many choices to master or find that the choices have been made by someone else (saved any HTML in Word lately?).
This was the promise of the browser, circa 1995: one application that allowed you to interact with your data, your projects, whatever, with the OS rendered a commodity. And as you can imagine, that threatens companies who are all about controlling access to all that through an OS.