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.

> So we finally have a free choice of OS

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 is Web techs aren't a silver bullet.

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.

s/smoothly/in the same crappy but standardized way/