Why would people want this? With the recent concerns of censorship and getting locked out of platforms this just feels like handing even more power to some central authority that can suddenly decide who can and cannot browse the web.
For most people that’s an implementation detail (that they are unaware of), combined with the overall lack of IT hygiene: I don’t see this being an issue (even if your points are very valid)
With web apps becoming more complex by the day, having the ability do all the heavy work on a remote server and stream the resulting “webpage” back to a weak receiver with little processing power will unlock new ways of doing things: one can imagine a very slim screen that, as mentioned in the thread already, is running the full Adobe Suite from this remote server.
Great battery life and responsiveness without needing an expensive GPU / CPU on the device itself.
Maybe testing? Companies like Browserstack offer that sort of thing as their core business.
Say that you just made a big frontend change to your website. Before you release it, you can open it on the last 10 major versions of desktop and mobile Chrome/Firefox/Safari/etc. Any rendering failures that you find are the sort of bugs that can be very frustrating to debug from occasional user contacts.
But it can be tricky to automate the detection of visual bugs. And what if you have to make a few clicks and execute some javascript to get to the screen that you want to test?
