I think JavaScript is the new PHP -- it's accessible enough that people are going to be coding in it for the foreseeable future. Chrome eats a lot of RAM, and

I think JavaScript is the new PHP -- it's accessible enough that people are going to be coding in it for the foreseeable future. Chrome eats a lot of RAM, and frankly, most of these apps don't need all of Chrome. But any solution that requires moving away from JavaScript (e.g. C++/Qt apps) is too expensive in terms of retraining developers. (Facebook found it was cheaper to create Hack and HHVM than to train its engineers to stop writing PHP-like code.) Maybe the answer here is a "React Native" library that results in native Windows/Linux/OS X desktop apps. But, with larger corps focusing on "mobile first" and "responsive design" memes, I don't imagine either Facebook or Google being the first to build such a thing.