It has nothing to do with the browser, it has to do with how opinionated your framework is. VB was highly opinionated; it made native windows-style UIs and not

It has nothing to do with the browser, it has to do with how opinionated your framework is. VB was highly opinionated; it made native windows-style UIs and nothing else. Nobody was taking arbitrary mockups from designers, with a wildly custom look-and-feel, and replicating them down to the pixel in VB. Today, most product GUIs are part of the brand. For better or worse, every company wants a distinctive look and feel and set of UI behaviors. This requires the tools used to build them to be much more complicated. You could replicate VB in a browser. Many people have done roughly that. But nobody uses them to build products, because their company doesn't want boring/generic UIs.