Performance is one thing, but to me it isn't the big one. I can even get over the crapfest that is HTML/CSS/Javascript if I really have to. The real problem wit

Performance is one thing, but to me it isn't the big one. I can even get over the crapfest that is HTML/CSS/Javascript if I really have to. The real problem with the web is that it doesn't work for anything serious. It's not really scriptable from the user-end and there are huge problems with data interchange. On the web I can't grab all of my Facebook photos, zip them up and send them somewhere else unless I write a monstrous pile of hacky code and break Facebook's TOS, but on a real computer it's absolutely trivial. If I want to slap together a disposable playlist of videos on Youtube I have no idea how. Maybe I have to log in? What if I want videos from a bunch of other websites? And even watching individual videos is terrible on the web. I either get a crappy website-dependent flash player or a crappy browser player, seemingly having lost the freedom to embed the video-playing application I want. The best user experience for watching online videos seems to be 1. Start buffering the video. 2. Browse to /proc/`pgrep plugin-container`/fd on my hard-drive. 3. Open the video in the player of my choice. That's insane, but I do it regularly. When the web lets me grab a text stream or a video or some music and lets me do what I want with it then it'll be ready for serious use. Until then it's just the "iPad" of technologies, a playground instead of a set of LEGO.