The browser is fine if you do browser things. But the browser doesn't work for everything. There are lots of things that work much better on the desktop because browsers have limited reach. Any sort of productivity application that need to deal with local files is hamstrung by the Web. Anything that wants access to local hardware, and even simple APIs that live on the machine are a no go zone.

Amazon? What has Amazon ever done that's 'dazzling' in terms of HTML? All their stuff looks as boring as it can get and functionally is practical and minimalistic at best. There's no doubt people have done some pretty amazing stuff with browser based Web apps, but a lot of that involves hand drawing stuff with low level graphics or crazy HTML gymnastics to beat HTML into submission.

HTML as an input platform sucks - it's really that simple. If you want rich interactive UI for input related forms - it's possible to do that but it's not easy and requires a lot of extra work. Work that for typical desktop apps is or native app is built in the box. HTML should have a better experience in this regard - a full compliment of common controls (yes more than the 10 or stock controls HTML provides), a real event model for those controls, a working component system that allows you to extend or build new controls easily and not via hacks (which is what just about all fancy UI controls you see today are - even simple controls like dropdowns are often recreated from raw HTML). This has been a thing for 20 years now. Think about the lack of progress on that!

Don't get me wrong - I mostly work on Web apps for development. I know reasonably well what works and what doesn't and I feel proficient. But that doesn't mean that I like it or don't realize the insane stuff we have to go through to make something look presentable.


+++ Rick ---




>>But even with those - in the end we're stuck with the Browser and DOM infrastructure and the slow as molasses W3C standards process that seems to be at a standstill.
>>
>>
>>+++ Rick ---
>
>Agreed but is that really bad?
>Let's crank the clock back and pretend that we had never left DOS.
>Except for plug and play (it saved my sanity) would our desktop apps be significantly worse off? Has the chaos created by a constantly changing underlying platform been worth cost of keeping up with it?
>For all its warts, HTML has at least been a stationary target.
>Amazon, Facebook, et al, have done some pretty dazzling things with that clunky platform.