The web is the dominant protocol for social computing. It's possible that the future's web will not have continuity with the web browsers of today. If the present batch of web browsers are deposed, which project will the deposer emerge from?
Definition: A "next web" has arrived when a browser with a new rendering engine for a new site format becomes popular (adoption from 30% of people) while lacking tight integration with a fully webkit-compatible HTML renderer. It may (and probably should) be able to visit or embed traditional web pages, but these pages lack most of the above features, and most of the pages people actively use are in a new format.
Background: The current web has fundamental issues. The most obvious one is that it's absolutely attached to the DOM, which is slow (still can't animate certain things, and imo is most of the reason google wave was miserable to use and died), extremely complex (there's basically only one implementation, at this point, Blink.), still lacks useful secure isolation between components (iframes are slow and constrained and component shadow doms don't currently seem to be attempting security at all. This prevents some pretty important kinds of user-extensibility). Currently dominant web browsers have many other weaknesses incidental to the central browser engine, lacking support for p2p protocols, having irritating constraints on their extensions APIs, still not quite having good support for shared local data. Everything is still oriented around HTTP and Javascript, which are not typed, while cross-language interfaces become increasingly feasible.
It's likely that this will resolve to just one of the options, but there are two ways we could get multiple resolutions:
Projects merging. EG, Notion, Logseq or workflowy (or even roamresearch) may well develop a flutter-based web page format, or the 2d components of whatever VR social environment becomes popular could use any of the other options.
The web may end up being torn into separate protocols that mostly don't talk to each other due to political interference. Suffering between China, the US, the EU, and their engineers.
Answers should name projects. I may resolve (new) answers that aren't projects to NO ๐. If you want to see another non-project answer, ask first.
@makoyass Why this might not happen: It's easiest to build for the protocol that everyone else is using. General purpose technologies are real, and there are especially tendencies towards generality with protocols. Most of the content people consume is new so there wont be as strong a need as people imagine for compatibility with old protocols.