> Yes, it was painful to develop applications using native UI elements but those apps provide a fantastic, consistent UI experience. That you can't easily hack

> Yes, it was painful to develop applications using native UI elements but those apps provide a fantastic, consistent UI experience. That you can't easily hack on (as in "customization"; userscripts and the like), aren't based on standards and have no sort of isolation or permission management. Both ways have their up- and downsides but I think the web is an upgrade. It's not the best possible solution and "native" could be where the web is today but we have it and it's okay. Also, I think the democratization of programming (whether it be UI frameworks or application development or whatever) is probably the best thing to happen to IT. I think we (as in, society) should make it possible for everyone to do whatever they want and a standards-driven (mostly) easy to understand programming model is a good way of providing that possibility for IT.