There's probably a couple of things missing from the early days - Flash - we quite often built components in flash to provide app-like experiences - the Browser

There's probably a couple of things missing from the early days - Flash - we quite often built components in flash to provide app-like experiences - the Browser Wars - how difficult it was sometimes just to reliably target a DOM element across browsers But the most startling thing that's changed since the late-90s is the 'tooling industry' and just how complex the tooling has become, for arguably marginal benefit to the users of the web.