It's impossible to predict things long-term. I mean, maybe we'll eventually get web applications that look and feel exactly like native apps. But maybe we'll st

It's impossible to predict things long-term. I mean, maybe we'll eventually get web applications that look and feel exactly like native apps. But maybe we'll still be stuck with kludgy, hacky, JS/HTML5-based apps that have rendering problems depending on your browser, that load in ugly chunks, that save your data to some proprietary cloud, that fail at concurrency, that don't integrate with your OS's multitasking workflow (Spaces, Mission Control), that take 5 times as long to run, and that stop working as soon as you go into a tunnel. And that's only from the user perspective; as a developer, I don't look forward to the nightmare of being stuck in a Javascript universe. I love being able to pick and choose from so many different frameworks, libraries, and languages when developing native apps; with Javascript, as soon as I try to do something simple, I inevitably end up with an SO answer that looks like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/950087/how-to-include-a-javascript-file-in-another-javascript-file http://stackoverflow.com/questions/950087/how-to-include-a-j... (And no, "use JQuery" is not an answer; it's a symptom.) Plus, it just feels shitty to not be able to own any of your tools. I don't want to rent my applications from some multinational corporation. I bought them, so they should be mine. (Yeah, yeah, nobody really owns anything anymore, but at least the bloody bits are on my drive!) In short, if web apps are the future, I hope that a) they're only one of several commonly used paradigms, and b) we have something better than a browser to run them in.