> Surely not in ease of development? Nope. Building a complex application in JS+HTML+CSS is still an enormously painful undertaking. > Ease of learning? Also

> Surely not in ease of development? Nope. Building a complex application in JS+HTML+CSS is still an enormously painful undertaking. > Ease of learning? Also nope. Complex applications are still complex. > Ease/portability/availability of tools? Compared to the development tools for other platforms (IDEs, profilers, etc), the web tools are far, far, far more limited. > Portability of the end app itself? Portability is a cost-cutting measure, but never a user-appreciated feature. The web would need to stand alone as a first-tier platform for this to be a net gain; as it is, web-only experience is subpar. > Available developer pool? Quality engineers capable of producing first-class applications for your users still cost a lot and are rare on the ground. > Open source code to look at and use? This is not even remotely unique to the web. > You're probably right, but oh wait, if only you'd investigated Shadow DOM and Polymers like I recommended you'd see that web technologies are rapidly advancing on that front as well. Catching up to 1990s application architecture is not really a cause to celebrate. The technology stack that drives desktop and mobile devices is massive. We don't build custom interfaces directly on top of OpenGL and call it a day.