There are good points, though I would say they're not insurmountable in most cases. I think desktop is moving towards sandboxed too, and will inevitably become more restrictive following Apple's lead. I think that's a good thing and we have the resources now to get that increased security without losing much performance.
Simple - I do think the simplicity of the web is is its greatest strength - it does limit what you can do with the web, but it also means it is not too hard to either produce content or create a browser (though nowadays the browser part is pretty challenging). CSS gradients are a good example in fact of the messy web process of experimentation, consensus, and eventual convergence - you will soon be able to use the prefixless style and not worry about several prefixed versions. Personally I'm not sure prefixes are a good idea anyway, but they do go away eventually.
Open - I meant as in anyone can contribute to the standard, and any vendor can write a browser, no one party controls it, as they do native platforms. I'm quite happy Java is blocked given who controls Java :) On the server of course, you can use whatever you want, whatever framework, language and paradigm you like, which is quite liberating when compared to say creating apps for iOS.
Extensible - well the standard actually allows for other languages, and JS being the only scripting language is more a quirk of history than anything else - there have been moves to allow byte code instead (Nacl), and I suspect that's the way things are heading - to a sandboxed VM which will run any compiled language. When that happens then a huge range of languages will open up, just like server side.
That being said, I don't see why non-locked-down native platforms are bad.
The biggest reason they're bad from my point of view is that they don't cater as the web does to hardware not invented yet (as the web does), obsolete hardware, or to other hardware platforms and are locked-in to a particular chip and instruction set, even if not locked down to an API. The other disadvantage is that you are locked in to whatever API (and typically language) the platform has chosen - everything must be written with that language, or with glue code interfacing to that language.
That's the big difference with the web - it defines a limited reference platform (the browser) which can be made for any hardware, and anyone can target using any server side tech they want. There is a clear division between client and server, and both can change completely without invalidating the other. That's a very powerful abstraction and one which I think gives it an advantage as a platform against any native platform which rivals it.
Simple - I do think the simplicity of the web is is its greatest strength - it does limit what you can do with the web, but it also means it is not too hard to either produce content or create a browser (though nowadays the browser part is pretty challenging). CSS gradients are a good example in fact of the messy web process of experimentation, consensus, and eventual convergence - you will soon be able to use the prefixless style and not worry about several prefixed versions. Personally I'm not sure prefixes are a good idea anyway, but they do go away eventually.
Open - I meant as in anyone can contribute to the standard, and any vendor can write a browser, no one party controls it, as they do native platforms. I'm quite happy Java is blocked given who controls Java :) On the server of course, you can use whatever you want, whatever framework, language and paradigm you like, which is quite liberating when compared to say creating apps for iOS.
Extensible - well the standard actually allows for other languages, and JS being the only scripting language is more a quirk of history than anything else - there have been moves to allow byte code instead (Nacl), and I suspect that's the way things are heading - to a sandboxed VM which will run any compiled language. When that happens then a huge range of languages will open up, just like server side.
That being said, I don't see why non-locked-down native platforms are bad.
The biggest reason they're bad from my point of view is that they don't cater as the web does to hardware not invented yet (as the web does), obsolete hardware, or to other hardware platforms and are locked-in to a particular chip and instruction set, even if not locked down to an API. The other disadvantage is that you are locked in to whatever API (and typically language) the platform has chosen - everything must be written with that language, or with glue code interfacing to that language.
That's the big difference with the web - it defines a limited reference platform (the browser) which can be made for any hardware, and anyone can target using any server side tech they want. There is a clear division between client and server, and both can change completely without invalidating the other. That's a very powerful abstraction and one which I think gives it an advantage as a platform against any native platform which rivals it.