[cbuq]

As giancarlostoro mentioned, it's mostly about the web ecosystem; web apps have an amazing number of opensource projects to take advantage of. I see a huge benefit from being cross-platform (windows/osx/linux/android/ios/even blackberry) and only having to develop and maintain one ui. Some examples I can think of are Spotify, Atom, Thunderbird. Web technologies are also being standardized more than many desktop technologies have been; - HTML5 (<video>, <canvas>, <template>) - CSS (styling) - WebRTC (peer-to-peer communication) - WebGL (3d) - Local Storage (local persistent storage) - Web Workers (threading) - Device APIs (geolocation, orientation, camera, other sensors)

I don't mean throw your website behind a mini-browser and call it desktop app, but if you design a desktop application with web technologies there are some very interesting combinations.

I also think the biggest gains come from realizing this is literally just the ui. The desktop application doesn't have to be written in javascript, you can still write your application logic in c++, and all you have to do is expose an endpoint and talk over localhost!