I definitely get what is being said here about web apps feeling slower. I've personally found desktop apps to in general be more responsive / quicker than web a

I definitely get what is being said here about web apps feeling slower. I've personally found desktop apps to in general be more responsive / quicker than web apps, and I think it's more than the communication layer. (Actually, I think REST is far more responsive than some of the previous middle tier communication methods used by desktop apps...). From what I've heard (no in depth knowledge so I welcome corrections), the DOM / CSS model itself really wasn't designed for fast, responsive applications and thus tends to under-perform in that department. So even a fully internal network app with comparable communication speed may seem slower on the browser from the get go. Many web apps often also tend to be a little bit laggy just based on their cloud based nature. Load a random spreadsheet on Google docs, and you are probably talking 100-200 requests and (depending on your network) perhaps a 5-7 second delay. Change a tab, and you probably have another 2-4 second delay. Compared to the 1 second load time of a spreadsheet and nearly instantaneous tab switching time on a native spreadsheet app, it feels slower... especially for the power users, I'm sure...