The initial implementation was a JavaScript-heavy web application in an era when people weren’t used to that. Browsers weren’t optimized to run so much code and

The initial implementation was a JavaScript-heavy web application in an era when people weren’t used to that. Browsers weren’t optimized to run so much code and so the user experience was terrible There seems to be some historical revisionism here. Perhaps you could have said that about Gmail but no, when Wave came out people were very much used to crappy web apps. Wave suffered because it tried to make browsers do too much but that's been a common pathology for the entire history of the web, it was nothing to do with users not being "used to it". If they'd written Wave as a desktop app it would have had more of a chance. I remember using it and the performance was awful, but not for any fundamental reason. Browsers just suck as app platforms.