[n4te]

Ah. One difference is a normal desktop can access a lot more or even all of your system. Otherwise cross platform UI toolkits exist: GTK, Qt, Swing, SWT, etc. They could be great but they aren't, not because it can't be done well just no one has managed to do it well. They could technically be sandboxed but they aren't, or not well. Java applets tried long ago and a lot of systems got owned.

You'd never design from the start the bonkers HTML/CSS, box model, and other junk we are stuck with, but browsers have a number of good aspects that you'd probably end up with in a complete redesign.

The problem is multifaceted. UI toolkits are very hard to do well (I have a lot of opinions on this, and my own crossplatform toolkit), even on a single platform. Just that alone is huge. There are basically no overall great UI toolkits, even if some have good parts. Even a theoretical great UI toolkit will have quite a task to achieve parity with what browser UIs can do.

If we could get past that (spoiler: we can't, no way in hell) then we'd also have to be willing to ditch all the legacy browser stuff to switch billions of users and devices to something new AND we'd still have many other big problems to deal with: getting the committee/everyone to agree without ruining it, security, privacy, etc.

We've accepted we can't really fix it, so the only thing we can do is keep extending it. That's how we got here.

[andoando]

Regarding security: I think this is already managed in the iOS/Android ecosystem. It shouldn't be too difficult to restrict permissions from sites, and has the advantage of possibly allowing accesses for sites you trust.

Regardling difficulty: HTML/CSS is essentially already cross platform UI toolkit. Yes its hard, but Im saying if one were to make it, I dont see why the same UI framework shouldnt work for a desktop application.

[n4te]

True those platforms have security controls, better than what we've ever seen on desktop. Desktop also needs controls like that: to use the system tray, filesystem, hardware, etc. There's at least a work multiplier of 3 for Windows, Mac, Linux. It's just one of many things needed.

Building the web toolkit took enormous effort and it sucks in many ways (see article). Theoretically a new one could be created and could also work for desktop, but there are lots of reasons why that won't happen.

[com2kid]

Plenty of great UI toolkits exist.

WPF was an amazing UI toolkit. Heck Silverlight was a great UI toolkit.

Even Swing was nice to code in, it just ran horrible on machines of the time.

[n4te]

Hard disagree. Lots exist but none are great. Usually layout isn't sane. Another blunder is components are too complex with too many layers. Customization and creating your own components becomes difficult. Often the event system is terrible.

Eg Swing has all those problems, in addition to ugly themes. The uncanny valley resulting from trying to mimic native UI was bad. At least nowadays users don't necessarily expect native looking UI, even browsers don't do it.

It's not a question of can you make a nice UI with it. You can drive a nail with a rock. The high pain needed to be productive with bad tools leads to Stockholm syndrome. People would rather stick with what they know than go through such pain again to learn something new, and rightly so when the new one is likely just as bad in new ways.