[soup10]

Html5 is a heavily sandboxed abstraction layer from hardware. It's designed to sacrifice performance and hardware access to provide a safe way for websites to display rich content. Additionally for non-canvas apps, you must interact with the convoluted mess that is the DOM.

Lower level languages are generally designed for maximum performance, and full-access to hardware. The assumption is that only trusted applications will be run.

In summary, html5 is a school playground where all the kids run in slow motion and the toys are made of plastic. You can sort of make new toys out of sand, but they are fragile and not that fun.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

You said complex UI development. HTML5 doesn't prevent that.

[soup10]

That wasn't me, but I agree. Especially for touch based and small screen devices like iPhones and iPads where HTML5 apps compete with native apps. It's much easier to create a fast and responsiveness non-standard UI natively than with HTML5. I haven't seen html5 app on mobile that has impressed me. Usually you can tell right away because they have unresponsive, laggy input.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

I think the unresponsiveness is largely because of too much JS and poor event handling by browsers, myself. I refuse to believe JS execution can actually be that slow.