Well first of all, Javascript is a shitty, poorly-designed language hacked together in a week by an asshole who went on to be famous for other such ‘great’ things as getting fired from Mozilla for homophobia and founding a crypto scam wrapped in a protection racket (Brave browser).

But that’s not even the whole of it. The entire concept of using scripting to turn a web page into an application is fundamentally flawed from the start, because HTML is a Language designed to Mark up HyperText documents and was never intended to give the developer web designer fine-grained control over the rendering at all, let alone consistently across browsers. It was designed for the user to be able to customize the fonts and colors and margins and whatnot so that he could read the document better! So then eventually somebody finally comes up with the bright idea to quit trying to render everything to HTML and just give programmers a fucking rectangle in a VM they can use arbitrary programming languages to draw on instead, and that’s how WebAssembly became a thing.

On top of that, even when you do manage to hack together some semblance of a functioning UI library (much like a serial killer crafting a suit made from the skin of his victim), after wasting orders of magnitude extra effort compared with just using an appropriate technology to begin with and while fundamentally breaking the entire design intent of the World Wide Web in the process, you still end up with your shitty UI running inside the page viewport of a web browser with its own UI surrounding it, for no fucking reason. And worse, the elements of that browser UI range from useless to misleading to things that break your app if the user clicks them (e.g. the back button), forcing you to do even more work to break the browser UI so it stops functioning as intended first. So then eventually somebody finally comes up with the bright idea to spend even yet more effort to strip the browser UI out of the browser, and that’s how Electron apps became a thing. But even then, the app still doesn’t match the system’s native UI and has to re-implement shit like dialog boxes because there’s multiple layers of cruft between it and the OS’s actual GUI API.

So anyway, the gist is that “web developers” have spent the last several decades piling shit upon shit upon shit hacking around a design that was fundamentally not fit for purpose (or rather, that I would argue was very fit for purpose but that purpose was not making goddamn applications!), only to finally start to approach some pale imitation of a decent thing now, by ripping out most of what they did before.

Meanwhile, all the way back in 2001, they could’ve just fucking written a Java app, with a Swing UI that had only one layer between it and the OS native GUI API and which would open in its own proper application window (that would have its own icon and minimize to the taskbar properly and act in pretty much all the other ways a first-class native application is supposed to act) and let the user launch it by clicking a hyperlink on a web page, just like a “modern” HTML+JS web app does. In 2001! This whole goddamn shitshow could’ve been avoided, with technology that already existed two and a half decades ago!

So why didn’t that happen instead? Two reasons: one, there was kind of a backlash against Java because of how overhyped it had been and also because it’s a little annoying to program in because of all the verbose boilerplate, and two – and I think more importantly – the entire Java app had to download before it could start running; there was no equivalent to AJAX to allow parts of the application and data to load on the fly. For that, it was deemed slow and unusable and got completely left by the wayside. But that was a huge mistake, because fixing that would’ve been a Hell of a lot less effort than building the entire Javascript ecosystem!