As a user, my experience with HTML/CSS/JS apps is great. Look at the excellent feedback the Atom Editor is getting.

As a developer, I feel that it's easier for me to create good user experience (nice UI, easy non-blocking I/Os by default, etc).

I don't say it's flawless, I say it's now becoming a very good alternative.

Oh, I'm writing web apps myself, but Gods, am I hating myself for it. OS integration is somewhere between a nightmare and impossible – and yes, it is desirable, unless you're on like Gnome 3 –, the resource requirements are abysmal (400 MB for an app that consists of a single input form, a table, and a search field, really Chrome?), performance is actually pretty lacklustre (non-blocking is one thing, actual multithreading another!), the UI isn't actually all that nice if you want to use it, not just look at it (say goodbye to accessibility; hell, even just proper keyboard navigation is black magic for most frameworks); and if you ship the engine yourself, you're now responsible for orchestrating and shipping bi-weekly browser updates to your customers to make sure your browser engine stays patched.

Is all that bullshit really worth… whatever we're saving? (Our company is mainly saving in developer salaries, because we can force kids fresh out of school to work for minimum wage, instead of hiring experienced developers… we'll see how long this keeps working.)

> As a user, my experience with HTML/CSS/JS apps is great. Look at the excellent feedback the Atom Editor is getting.

For some less positive feedback on Atom, which reinforces some of creshal's points, see the Atom section of this text editor rundown:

http://eev.ee/blog/2015/05/31/text-editor-rundown/

I've also frequently seen complaints to the effect that Atom is much too slow, even on machines only a few years old. Even my 486 laptop back in 1997 could run a text editor with syntax highlighting (specifically, JPad for programming in Java). What are editors doing these days that needs so much CPU power?

> For some less positive feedback on Atom, which reinforces some of creshal's points, see the Atom section of this text editor rundown:

> http://eev.ee/blog/2015/05/31/text-editor-rundown/

This review (6 months ago) is based on an early version of Atom Editor (0.204.0), the latest stable (1.2.4) is way more mature and provides very nice packages [1].

[1] https://atom.io/packages

JavaScript programmers are truly delusional sometimes.

It’s not really JavaScript, I’d argue it’s a different reason.

node-webkit apps are cheaper to develop. Far cheaper.

Everyone can write a webapp, a native application requires professional developers. The payroll looks completely different.

And then the devs who have only worked with node-webkit don’t know how much better they could have it. I know devs who refuse to use map, reduce and filter, because "it’s black magic and we always used for".