And it was a trade off. I think most of us are well acquainted with the advertised advantages of open standards and web application architecture as we know it. But it came at the expense of both user experience and developer experience on par with traditional desktop applications. E.g. arbitrary languages (esp. compiled languages), fast graphics, great UI toolkits. We get some approximation of such things at a glacial pace, or it’s always just over the horizon. Everybody is leery of adopting a comprehensive framework only backed by a single corporation (is this what held Java back?) but standards bodies take 20 years to deliver a bright idea like compiling your favorite language to byte code that can execute in the browser.