Agree, althought I'm not fully convinced the web is fit for "web apps", or that even "web apps" make sense. At least not with current technology.
Developing apps to run on the browser still implies a lot of redundancy: you are forced to work with solutions that weren't created for interactive applications in the first place (HTTP, DOM), limited to one language designed by comitee (Javascript) and code reuse is minimal. Everything just feels hackish (at best) compared to native frameworks (e.g., Apple's Cocoa), and in the end it's hard to achieve good UX and compatibility.
I would rather see more people deploying native aplications with great UX backed by REST APIs than shoe-horning apps into browsers (which break the web).
1) Developers are worried that a user won't try their app if they have to install something on their computer.
2) Compatibility , support anything that can render HTML , although this may no longer be the case with the amount of chrome only apps I see.
3) Firewalls, you can get out on port 80 pretty much anywhere, that random port number you decided to use for your app not so much.
4) A few years back web programming was seen as the "easy" way to get into development since writing relatively limited PHP was a lot easier than wrangling C++ and the Windows SDK. Therefor web developers reached critical mass.
Java applets and Flash did a reasonable job with 1 and 2, but they seem to be some of the most hated parts of the web, I think part of this may be because they are see as "too powerful".
People want the web to be lightweight.
The problem with Java applets and Flash is that they are a broken model inside another broken model - they shoe-horn their own VMs to run applications inside a browser. It's the ultimate hack.
The web, as it was originally envisioned, makes perfect sense: HTTP, URIs and hypertext to provide navigable content, period. On the other hand, building interactive applications by manipulating the DOM while reinveinting UI patterns and widgets over and over again seems like a hack that grew to enormous proportions.
I feel the reason why "web apps" are so popular is because it allows small startups to develop more-or-less cross-compatible products faster and with fewer resources than developing a webservice and then hiring 4 engineers: one for a Windows client, one for a Mac client, one for a iOS client and one for an Android client. The fact browsers all follow more-or-less the same standards and they all run Javascript turned them on the "write once, run everywhere" platform that Java failed to deliver, but in my opinion it's still (very) far away from ideal.
Frankly, I'm wondering how nice a GUI you can write inside Inferno. Just have everyone install an Inferno client and serve your app as a mountable filesystem containing the VM code to JIT as a binary file.
Java applets and Flash aren't hated because they're powerful. It's because they're perceived as slow. Java applets used to make my entire browser freeze up for a few seconds when they loaded. Before installing AdBlock, I would regularly see Flash ads chugging along at 100% on one of my CPU cores.
It's a shame that your post is disappearing into the gray background - I feel something similar every time I have to use Javascript & HTML for a rich interface.
Every time that happens, I wish I was using GTK or QT instead.
Developing apps to run on the browser still implies a lot of redundancy: you are forced to work with solutions that weren't created for interactive applications in the first place (HTTP, DOM), limited to one language designed by comitee (Javascript) and code reuse is minimal. Everything just feels hackish (at best) compared to native frameworks (e.g., Apple's Cocoa), and in the end it's hard to achieve good UX and compatibility.
I would rather see more people deploying native aplications with great UX backed by REST APIs than shoe-horning apps into browsers (which break the web).