Case in point: Notice that the web technology stack is really complex. So are the native GUI toolkits on all mature platforms. And something like wxWidgets that wraps all those toolkits is its own kind of complexity. "I know, I'll implement my own beautifully simple UI toolkit and bind it to the core graphics and input APIs on each platform." Congratulations; your beautifully simple solution is going to be off limits to some users, because you haven't handled accessibility, internationalization, etc. So some of that complexity you wanted to avoid was necessary after all. But maybe we can still categorically reject the web stack for applications that don't actually run in a browser.