People forget that you used to boot your PC into a game disk to play a game. When people started playing games in Windows (full-screen), people like the grandparent poster would RAIL that booting to a game disk would always be superior to building a game on top of Windows.

We still have consoles, which get much better performance for the given hardware. True they can't compete with desktops even with the inefficiencies built in, but that is not relevant.

The web faces fundamental limitations as long as it is built on the current architecture of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Windows, being a general purpose OS like Linux, has far less restrictions.

John Carmack famously reported that you can double the performance of a game engine, if you know exactly what the hardware configuration is.

I think that ENTIRELY explains the performance gain you see in consoles.

And for most apps, no, there is no major difference in the user interface capabilities of a browser, and a Win32 GUI.

Honestly, I'm always surprised that games can even run on top of windows and all its accouterments: anti-virus, indexing, random services, etc. I'm assuming there's some API in windows that lets games tell Windows to chill while the game is running.

In 20 years I predict I'll still prefer executing code at the local OS level to thin client code hosted within an application running in the local OS. And having the application state updated after accessing local memory rather than after communicating across a network. We don't have to wait 20 years to experience the benefits of hosted applications, we have them today. And they sounded good to me. But after enjoying those benefits, I'd still give them up for the reliability and responsiveness of native applications.

One thing that isn't going away in twenty years (or probably ever)- the speed of light. There is a hard limit on how fast latency can get.

what about gigabit net connections? When you run into the limit of a single worker's capability, you employ a second worker! (that's the reasoning behind modern processors btw). And thus, speed of light isn't an issue....