Basically, we could’ve had more or less what we’re just now getting with WebAssembly two and a half decades ago with Java Web Start. They’re not completely equivalent — WebAssembly can run any(?) language and interacts with the system via browser APIs, whereas Java Web Start could only run JVM languages (which was an even worse limitation back in the day since things like Kotlin and Scala didn’t exist yet) but interacted with the system using the more desktop-application-oriented Java Class Library. I think JWS applications would still have the advantage over Electron/WebAssembly applications in terms of user experience and feeling “native” (especially since a lot of web apps gave up even trying to resemble native UIs), but would probably be clunkier from a developer perspective since whatever solution they came up with instead of AJAX would likely not be as flexible due to nature of Java vs. JavaScript (statically typed and compiled vs. barely typed and interpreted).