If your application needs to do some heavy lifting on the client machines, then yes desktop technologies will be better. Web browsers are sand boxed for securi

If your application needs to do some heavy lifting on the client machines, then yes desktop technologies will be better. Web browsers are sand boxed for security and can be too limited for some purposes. Desktop applications can avoid security problems inherent in web apps that are run through a general purpose browser. The commonly cited tradeoff with desktop apps is they are harder to deploy and update. I don't believe this is necessarily true. You can tell a desktop application to periodically check for updates and notify the user to restart before allowing further writes to any central data stores. If fact many already do this. Problems arise when the OS prevents updates from being applied by non-admin users and you are deploying within a locked down corporate environment. Java SE/Swing is a good platform for writing cross platform desktop applications. I work on an engineering simulation tool with a complex UI written in Swing. With Nimbus Look and Feel it looks and works the same across Windows, Linux and OS X without changes. Some people (devs) complain that is doesn't look native - none of my users care though. The few times I have ventured into web development I have been horrified by the amount of work required to get web apps to look and work the same across different browsers. JQuery and Bootstrap deal with a lot of the pain but web dev still feels very hacked-together compared to desktop development to me.