I think is part of it. It's hard to pirate something you can't get a copy of. Other things is that the web is more universal. Say I have a great client app. It

I think is part of it. It's hard to pirate something you can't get a copy of. Other things is that the web is more universal. Say I have a great client app. It works perfectly on a client Windows machine. If I want to tap the larger market I have to have an OS X version, an Android version, iOS (depending if I didn't target both when doing the OS X version), and a Linux version. To keep all of these people happy, the versions should be pretty much the same. That's hard to do with client software on multiple targets. The web targets the lowest common denominator: browsers. Fortunately as those go, the VM that is the browser is pretty powerful. Sure I might not be in my preferred language, but I can get things done. If done right, powers are added as the device becomes more capable my leveraging existing frameworks like Bootstrap, etc.