The web won because it's cross platform, keeps state across everything and puts collaboration among users first. In a lot of ways that's easier for users - it'

The web won because it's cross platform, keeps state across everything and puts collaboration among users first. In a lot of ways that's easier for users - it's the closest thing to a universal OS. This is mostly a failure of desktop operating systems to be interoperable and perhaps most seriously fail to support good network first/collaborative thinking in design. I think they did this in part because they saw being distinct as a way to differentiate themselves, but also because they were created pre-internet before a lot of modern application use cases were really possible or relevant, in the end this made them less competitive and native applications less desirable (in most cases). I also wish it wasn't that way because the web has a lot of issues, it's slow, creates incentives towards megacorps that run centralized servers and ads, etc. All this is one of the reasons I'm hopeful Urbit might succeed against all odds - they're rebuilding the OS with network first in mind. Chrome isn't really comparable to windows because anyone can make a browser that reads the open web standards - while only Microsoft could make an OS that ran windows apps (outside of hacks). This reason is why web won out over native even though native apps have nice performance advantages. That plus limited amounts of high quality devs can target the web and ship to everyone without having to build multiple native applications for multiple platforms, and again native platforms still haven't solved collab really.