&gt; Except speed, a really nice IDE and good Windows support.<p>Web dev doesn&#x27;t need any of these things. If you need them, then what you are doing isn&#x27;t web dev, it&#x27;s something else.<p>&gt; it&#x27;s a bad thing that .NET has the same goal for Windows-centric devs?<p>What is &quot;Windows-centric&quot; development? That doesn&#x27;t even make sense. Web dev is a fairly specific domain with a standards-based protocol stack that&#x27;s been iterated reliably on for 30 some-odd years. The sources of variability, the browsers themselves, are well-documented now and even when the variations weren&#x27;t, you could earn a pretty good living specializing in them.<p>Microsoft seems to throw their devs under the bus with every new release.