I don't think things will change a great deal in 5 years. I would love to be wrong, but the progress of web standards and browser technology is painfully slow.

I don't think things will change a great deal in 5 years. I would love to be wrong, but the progress of web standards and browser technology is painfully slow. The things at the leading edge of development are amazing, but there is an enormous gap between the first browser supporting something and being able to assume that most users will have support. There is also a very slow progression due to the rather annoying notion that everything must have a 'Use Case'. WebGL comes along and when that got into browsers the need for Typed Arrays became more evedent, once people started making games and so-forth they wanted fullscreen options once things were fullscreen people wanted to use mouse movement rather than mouse pointer position so that FPS games could work properly. Each advance demonstrates a new deficiency which gets fixed but it takes another iteration of browser development and release. I think the change is coming, it's just that the timeframe of 5 years is just too short. I started a project a few years ago aiming to do Desktop style things using HTML+CSS+JS. When I started I was just mucking around and I expected something better to come along and I'd abandon the project, but I'm still plodding along ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7namj7iy16Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7namj7iy16Y ). Along the way I came across a simple idea as a test of whether or not WebApps were up to the job of desktop work. Completely replace the functionality notepad.exe (or OS Specific equivalent level program) with a Webapp. The text editing part is easily managed, but the test is not for what can be done but what can't. What about opening all .txt files with it, editing then saving the result to the desktop, or hacking on startup scripts when nothing else is available? Much of the behaviour of WebApps assumes that "It's on the Cloud". That is a Deal breaker for a lot of people. Especially since Snowden. We're getting there (or at least somewhere) but we're not doing it terribly quickly.