I think that is a little bit unfair. I think plenty of developers, myself included wouldn't mind or would like to do native applications. Every time someone does those, a mountain of people ask "why" and "this shoulda/coulda been a web app." And some of that is somewhat reasonable. It's easier to achieve decent-ish cross platform. But also tons of consumers also just don't wanna download and install applications unless it comes from an App Store. And even then, it's iffy. Or most often the case, it's a requirement of the founders/upper management/c-suite. And lets be honest, when tons of jobs ask for reactive experience or vue.js, what motivates developers to learn GTK or Qt or Winforms or WinUI3?

It's also reasonable from a business point of view to say "we can't justify the investment to optimize our software in the current environment." I assume this is what's happening - people are trying to get their products in customers hands as quickly as possible, and everything else is secondary once it's "good enough." I suspect it's less about developers and more about business needs.

Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).

Real talk.

Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of natural causes since the 2000s.

That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s era failed to transmit to the next generation of developers?

It's not just electron apps or browsers, as I'd argue modern .NET apps are almost as bad.

I have an example.

I use Logos (a Bible study app, library ecosystem, and tools) partially for my own faith and interests, and partially because I now teach an adult Sunday school class. The desktop version has gotten considerably worse over the last 2-3 years in terms of general performance, and I won't even try to run it under Wine. The mobile versions lack many of the features available for desktop, but even there, they've been plagued by weird UI bugs for both Android and iOS that seem to have been exacerbated since Faithlife switched to a subscription model. Perhaps part of it is their push to include AI-driven features, no longer prioritizing long-standing bugs, but I think it's a growing combination of company priorities and framework choices.

Oh, for simpler days, and I'm not sure I'm saying that to be curmudgeonly!

I use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web sites. There are several options for my hourly weather update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found any that are light weight - I just need to know if it would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)

fun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed. `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days.

("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its sessionstore. In-memory is much safer.)

Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.

I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software developers who even know how to develop and distribute native apps.

And when, for whatever reason, having a "desktop application" becomes a priority to developers, what do they do? Write it in Electron and ship a browser engine with their app. Yuuuuuuck!