Facebook is arguably a sophisticated real-time communications and social networking app. Imagine if Facebook launched a desktop app to do that. Who would use it? Would they ever have become as successful as they are today? My reading is the author seems to think something like Facebook is entirely unsuitable for the web and contrary to what it was designed for, but I think it excels in a browser because of, not in sprite of, the strengths of the web: cross-platform, URLs, connectivity, low barrier of entry, and so on.

Someone will probably bring up the Facebook HTML5 mobile app thing, but consider on desktop it was always good enough, and in fact they still have a mobile web version of Facebook, which as far as I am aware is also pretty good. I think the main problem Facebook faced with their mobile app was the immaturity of web view controls on mobile, which have since come on by leaps and bounds (WKWebView on iOS 8+, Chromium web view on Android 4.4+).