I don't agree that it's "much more expensive" - and I've been developing applications with UIs in Win32 for a long time.
Also, even if native apps were "more expensive", that's only from the developers' perspective -- and for a good app, the number of users far outnumbers its developers, so any "increased resource consumption" gets foisted on and effectively multplied by all the users. Only the developers get any benefit from this; but even then, since developers are themselves users, if they use apps that others have similarly developed with this culture of "selfishness", they get to experience the "increased resource consumption" too. In the end, I don't think this vicious cycle of waste benefits anyone except the hardware manufacturers.
In general, I think treating resources like they're infinite and "there will always be more" is almost certainly guaranteed to make it so there won't ever be enough.
This Firefox.html is a fun experiment to push boundaries, like WebKit.js and all the other interesting things you can do with JS and an HTML rendering engine (e.g. see Fabrice Bellard's complete PC emulator in a browser), and somewhat reminds me of other tricks like nesting VMs.
As long as the users want more and more apps very cheaply they might have to accept the performance they get. It has also been a problem that most OS's have different GUI frameworks which means you have to re-devlop every app/application multiple times. This is an enormous time sink. When all operating system uses the same GUI framework (and possibly the same languages) it might be very effective to use that instead of html+css. Until that it is still expensive and as I started with, the users want more for less.
Also, even if native apps were "more expensive", that's only from the developers' perspective -- and for a good app, the number of users far outnumbers its developers, so any "increased resource consumption" gets foisted on and effectively multplied by all the users. Only the developers get any benefit from this; but even then, since developers are themselves users, if they use apps that others have similarly developed with this culture of "selfishness", they get to experience the "increased resource consumption" too. In the end, I don't think this vicious cycle of waste benefits anyone except the hardware manufacturers.
In general, I think treating resources like they're infinite and "there will always be more" is almost certainly guaranteed to make it so there won't ever be enough.
This Firefox.html is a fun experiment to push boundaries, like WebKit.js and all the other interesting things you can do with JS and an HTML rendering engine (e.g. see Fabrice Bellard's complete PC emulator in a browser), and somewhat reminds me of other tricks like nesting VMs.