The browser is the common client app runtime that the JVM/Swing platform always wanted to be. Native will always feel better, but the browser gives us a way to

The browser is the common client app runtime that the JVM/Swing platform always wanted to be. Native will always feel better, but the browser gives us a way to express cross platform designs much better/faster/cheaper than most native toolkits do, and far better than any cross platform toolkit that I've seen. The tradeoff is performance in a big way. Think of it this way, it's like the web is like OnLive or Galaki streaming to play a game and native is like playing a game on your local device. Streaming game performance is inherently worse, but at some point might be good enough/great for most people such that the investment in native games on local hardware no longer makes sense for certain games. I think most people don't realize or think through the fact that they are making that performance tradeoff in exchange for other things. Maybe people should have that discussion.