<i>&gt; maybe the cross-platform nature of HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS will also be vital to future applications.</i><p>There are already cross-platform toolkits that can deliver everything a browser engine can, faster and safely.<p>Face it, &quot;web technologies&quot; are not winning because of any massive technological advancement, just like C++ wasn&#x27;t this huge advancement over C. They just managed to achieve enough critical mass to make everything else look less popular. In the &#x27;90s, OOP did that through academia and commercial push (in what was a much smaller tech sector); html&#x2F;css&#x2F;js did it through the accidental monopoly that is the web browser. The end result is basically the same.