It's the closest thing we have to a general purpose, cross platform application engine that pretty much runs anywhere with a GUI interface (for anything updated in the past 3-5 years).
Browsers are more easily available on every major, and most minor platforms than any GUI toolkit out there... Things like atom, brackets and similar make sense. They translate well between standalone app in an OS, or a platform app for the likes of ChromeOS, or as a SaaS app in a browser.
No, they aren't the fastest, lightest or best performing. They don't even have the smallest codebases... what they are is broadly available, with minimal variance and a lot of developers with most of the knowledge needed to maintain them.
Using CSS magic tricks and JavaScript to make an unordered list appear like a menu or a toolbar just feels wrong, just as one example from many.
I liked the way XHTML was going to remove the semantic and pave way for proper components, sadly it never happened that way.
Anyone experienced with XAML and similar layout engines can see how much better the browsers could be, if people wouldn't insist into binding a document model into an application engine.
Even with HTML 5, which still is a problem to support properly across multiple devices without a "debug everywhere" attitude, has less widgets support than a 90's GUI.
Completely agree. The fundamental problem is that HTML and CSS are the wrong tools for webapps. They are designed for documents. This is why all these CSS rules are so hard to use for applications. It is built on the model of a document, not a user interface.
The situation is immensely worse on machines like the Raspberry Pi or the BeagleBoard. People have drunk the HTML5 kool-aid and now want to run HTML5 on such machines. When you see how these boards choke when running stuff like an asteroids clone in Firefox or Chrome, you weep. Write the same thing in C++, or in something like XAML/XUL/QML/Enlightenment Edje, and it is super smooth.
My favourite would be something like QML, but with Lua instead of Javascript (but a Lua variant where the array indices start with 0, not with 1). Lua is much easier to accelerate properly, as LuaJIT has shown.
So use a component adapter, like polymer... That said, I wouldn't mind something closer to XAML or Flash/Flex that was an open specification, with a cleaner language implementation (though, I like JS)...
The trouble is actually getting a cross-platform rendering engine working everywhere that HTML/HTTP already works... So, you go build it, get it working at LEAST on Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS... then we'll see how adoption goes. More likely you'll see React* bindings take off with generators to whatever platform is targetted, with JS as the language in use.
I don't want to spend money on the side projects I'm just playing with, but it would be nice to have them cross-platform (including mobile). Do any of those options still apply? IIRC Xamarin is expensive and there's no free way to run Java on iOS? All the SDL-based GUIs I've seen have looked awful.
Qt would be lovely - what does using it from Android Java look like? I remember messing with the Qt Java bindings a while ago and finding them a bit ropey.
Browsers are more easily available on every major, and most minor platforms than any GUI toolkit out there... Things like atom, brackets and similar make sense. They translate well between standalone app in an OS, or a platform app for the likes of ChromeOS, or as a SaaS app in a browser.
No, they aren't the fastest, lightest or best performing. They don't even have the smallest codebases... what they are is broadly available, with minimal variance and a lot of developers with most of the knowledge needed to maintain them.