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The web apps I'm talking about are best-of-breed; not just some random crap on a web site somewhere. They're still slower than what I was using on Windows 95.

I also disagree that app development was harder back then. Back then we had IDEs that included online help and APIs that were actually _designed_. It wasn't a perfect world but it was at least coherent.

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You're gonna need to list some examples of both, 'cause you kinda sound like a crank here.

Also, I don't really get what you're complaining about in terms of IDEs or API design here--go spend some time on the Mozilla Developer Network and come back and tell me it's just slapdash and thoughtless work.

I didn't say that it was slapdash our thoughtless; don't put those words into my mouth. It is truly admirable the great effort that people at Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft have put into improving the web.

What I'm saying is that if you sat down to design a nice cross-platform, distributed environment for building applications it would not look like the web.

To paraphrase: If you sat down to build something other than the web you wouldn't end up with the web.

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