So we finally have a free choice of OS.
It's not the full story to complain about people solving the problems that the OS side had already solved decades ago. The big new thing is that they are doing so in a platform agnostic way. That I have nine different virtual machines installed on four different operating systems and the same code base can run on all of them smoothly.
Except that's not true: Webkit, Gecko, Trident... they are all different "OSs" you're writing for, you just wave them away by shipping the OS with the application. You could do the same by shipping a virtualised image running a stripped-down Linux configured to run only one application. One of these solutions is now socially acceptable, but both manage to completely discard everything the desktop OS achieved in 30 years.
Not really, you still a browser that implement all this stuff. The only difference is Open tech vs proprietary.
Open technologies are obviously a good thing. Writing a software as complex as Photoshop for instance with the exact same features with HTML/CSS and JavaScript isn't going to fly and be usable for someone who has to work 10 hours a day on it. The performance issues will be significant. It's not a big deal for an text editor though I still can't open a 5mb log file in Atom for some reasons. No problem with Sublime Text 2 or Vim. Why is this ?
My point wasn't that they are a silver bullet. My point was simply to say that while something is obviously lost (performance, native integration, etc...), something else is gained. And that is massive portability.
