In early '00s, there surely were apps made and distributed as .hta files. Not much as .exes, of course, because even with ActiveX, DHTML was quite limited.
Heck, when I was in school, me and a buddy wrote a desktop web chat client using that tech (we wanted fancy text formatting and image posting that "official" webchat page hadn't, but we had - because it server lacked proper HTML sanitization, lol)
Just look at the Windows APIs there are a wealth of things Microsoft doesn't want in browsers if they can avoid it.
Well... there are people on the browser team trying their best, but the resource constraints keep investment where it needs to be to protect Windows and Office licensing.
You can get all that through UWP, though, can't you?
[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/hosted...
I don't really understand. I never paid a license to create and distribute native applications.
But also you provide the content which makes Windows licenses have value. If there were no Windows apps, they couldn't price it higher than Linux.
Before the .NET age, Microsoft was very active with ideas about bringing Web on desktop.
Historically, the web version of office is not really a stand-alone product, and is designed to be a helpful feature for people who primarily use office on a Windows PC.
I'll tell you. Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue, so they hobbled Netscape, brought browser development in house, and made a prohibition on allowing web pages to be integrated tightly into the OS.
If those electron apps could get the same OS integration in the browser as native apps get, the distributable could be kilobytes, even smaller than your Delphi executable.
But how would Microsoft and Apple make money if they're just a host for web apps? They're not going to turn themselves into a commodity/utility.