The interesting thing, for me, is that I recall the &quot;golden age&quot; of cross-platform GUI widgeting toolkits to be 1997-2001.    AWT, Swing, SWT, wxWidgets, Qt, Gtk, Tk, MFC, XUL, and many others.<p>And this coincided almost perfectly with the rise of the web and the end of desktop GUI supremacy.  The few big desktop successes in the 2000s (uTorrent, DropBox) often used no framework at all or had minimalist UIs where they used little-known corners of the OS but moved the heavy interface lifting to the web.<p>I&#x27;m wondering if this is part of the general pattern of things reaching perfection just as they become obsolete.  Right when a technology reaches mainstream adoption, everyone has an opinion about how to do it &quot;right&quot;, and right as it reaches mainstream adoption, all the major opportunities have been plucked clean.