[jakubw]

I've used Qt a lot. In fact, I'm still a big fan and wasn't trying to sound negative about it in any way. I absolutely agree that Qt does a tremendous job at abstracting away the differences but still, it's the little details that matter and no toolkit could address them all. Things like ribbons on Windows. Multi touch support, cover flow and proper OS X-like multiple window management on Mac. Not to mention mobile. For big applications, these glitches add up and in no time you find yourself resorting to way too many native workarounds.

But my main point was to that cross-browser Web toolkits and cross-platform GUI toolkits are apples and oranges. On the Web there are no UI guidelines. It's essentially free for all. The chrome of the Web browser constitutes a clear separation point between the native experience and the Web experience, which makes it possible for things like Gmail not to feel hostile on Mac, Linux, Windows and any other Web-enabled environment. Whether or not that's good for UX is irrelevant, the fact remains is that Web apps have never tried to integrate seamlessly with the look and feel of the host environment and the users have grown accustomed to that.