[godson_drafty]

> When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Not entirely. Sometimes they were replaced by applets, which are just native application wrapped in a thin layer of html. This causes its own set of problems. At one place I worked (a large government agency), a critical spreadsheet ran as an applet which was only compatible with IE9. They couldn't upgrade anyone's PC's because they risked an auto-update of IE, which would break the ability to run that app.

At another job, a certain time tracking application ran as an applet, requiring a specific version of the jvm to be installed.

Deploying an application that runs in the browser using the browser's native capabilties - js, html, css works great. Using it to embed an applet doubles the misery, as in the short term management thinks they've purchased a portable, always-compatible "web-app", while what they've done is bought a native binary they can no longer properly provision their workstations to run.