Years ago the web was not powerful enough, hence Macromedia/Adobe Flash. Adobe got complacent, thought it was the king of the world.
Then Microsoft joined the RIA fray with Silverlight, battling for control of the web. Flash was everywhere, SL up-and-coming. It was meant to be a spectacular battle, but both companies were blind-sided by this little web standard thing which was about to crash the party...
Except that it didn't. The war didn't end because someone won, but because Steve Jobs said so. It was only an illusion that HTML5 renders the RIA plugins irrelevant. In reality, it was the emergence of native apps. First iPhone, then Android, iPad, and now even Windows/Metro. Who cares about rich cross-browser apps?
So instead of developing a rich application that runs on all platforms, you either use HTML5/Javascript (if your application is not as hard), or implement the same thing on 3 platforms with 3 different languages on using 3 different toolsets. Wanna do something very rich/powerful cross-browser? Forget it! Everybody happy now?
I think you hit the nail on the head - something very few people understand. I don't doubt that HTML5 will eventually catch up to the functionality of Flash... in 10 years or so. Until then? Native Apps and hacks to make basic layout and animations work cross browser. Adobe failed hard as well, they couldn't produce a non-buggy plugin for all operating systems and mobile devices. Had they done this, I don't think SJ could have refused it access to the app store.
You make it sound so big-brother-esque, but users are the ones who chose native apps over the browser. iOS has had excellent HTML/Javascript support since the first iPhone - vastly, vastly better than any of its contemporary competitors. In addition, web developers had a full year after it's release to create compelling web apps, but instead they clamoured for native 3rd-party apps.
What's held back web apps is not Steve Jobs, but the fact that creating them is incredibly painful and produces results that are barely acceptable except in a very small number of cases where the application is effectively a web page to begin with. The standards and libraries have evolved extremely slowly due to the difficulty of pushing out browser support across such a wide range of slowly-updating platforms. What counts as amazing in the average web app today wouldn't have been an impressive native client application in 1992.
So... I gather that you are mostly (but violently) agreeing with me? I said there was a 3-way war between Silverlight, Flash, and web app. At the end, Steve Jobs made the call that they all suck and went with native app. He could have sticked with Flash or web (and that was the original plan), but he went ahead with native, a brilliant move in hindsight. Everyone went "what!", "how dare you!" and then "ooh, ahh", and the rest is history.
And this is the truth. No matter how much people want it to be the HTML5/JS/CSS3 combination is not on the same level as Flash right now. Plugins are a pain but it feels like we are moving sideways and not up. I use to be a web standards fan but in recent years not as much.I guess the grass is always greener....
Then Microsoft joined the RIA fray with Silverlight, battling for control of the web. Flash was everywhere, SL up-and-coming. It was meant to be a spectacular battle, but both companies were blind-sided by this little web standard thing which was about to crash the party...
Except that it didn't. The war didn't end because someone won, but because Steve Jobs said so. It was only an illusion that HTML5 renders the RIA plugins irrelevant. In reality, it was the emergence of native apps. First iPhone, then Android, iPad, and now even Windows/Metro. Who cares about rich cross-browser apps?
So instead of developing a rich application that runs on all platforms, you either use HTML5/Javascript (if your application is not as hard), or implement the same thing on 3 platforms with 3 different languages on using 3 different toolsets. Wanna do something very rich/powerful cross-browser? Forget it! Everybody happy now?