[snickerbockers]

isn't TFA about how the problem is cloud-infrastructure? web-app will only make that worse unless you're thinking something like adobe air.

Also, as others already noted, somehow the web is uniquely terrible at maintaining compatibility across not only different platforms but different versions of the same platform and even different versions of the same browser, despite being built largely on top of high-level languages that all claim to enable effortless portability.