As giancarlostoro mentioned, it&#x27;s mostly about the web ecosystem; web apps have an amazing number of opensource projects to take advantage of. I see a huge benefit from being cross-platform (windows&#x2F;osx&#x2F;linux&#x2F;android&#x2F;ios&#x2F;even blackberry) and only having to develop and maintain one ui. Some examples I can think of are Spotify, Atom, Thunderbird. Web technologies are also being standardized more than many desktop technologies have been; 
- HTML5 (&lt;video&gt;, &lt;canvas&gt;, &lt;template&gt;)
- CSS (styling)
- WebRTC (peer-to-peer communication)
- WebGL (3d)
- Local Storage (local persistent storage)
- Web Workers (threading)
- Device APIs (geolocation, orientation, camera, other sensors)<p>I don&#x27;t mean throw your website behind a mini-browser and call it desktop app, but if you design a desktop application with web technologies there are some very interesting combinations.<p>I also think the biggest gains come from realizing this is literally just the ui. The desktop application doesn&#x27;t have to be written in javascript, you can still write your application logic in c++, and all you have to do is expose an endpoint and talk over localhost!