Only just starting? It was pretty apparent after the DHTML craze of the late 1990s fell flat on its face that web apps weren't any threat to native desktop apps. Then the exact same thing happened during the mid 2000s, when AJAX was all the rage. The more recent HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript fad is yet one more revival of the same failed set of ideas.
I think those eras had browsers that weren't capable of delivering on the promise.
If you only work with IE9+ (all the other browsers are quite good now) you will be working in a run time environment that is far superior to those available in the DHTML/Ajax era.
Another issue is that very few people know how to do large scale JS applications, where I work we do (130,000K+ lines of code, 900+ classes) but it has taken us several iterations to get to this stage.
I believe we are planning on making our tools open-source so hopefully people will start to see that large scale JS apps are very doable. www.caplin.com if you want to keep an eye on the open sourcing of our tooling.
We have a framework more than a library, we basically ship a framework that our clients use to create their own web trading applications. This framework covers many asset classes and many use cases.
It's not likely that any client would use all of our code and so we have build a tool framework that only pulls in the JS code that your application uses, this is done without a build and is immediately available (add a 'new namespace.sub.Class()' line and hit f5 and it will be in the js bundle you get.)
Are you seriously trying to suggest that people don't?
I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you, but desktop apps are still very widely used by all sorts of people. This includes home users, business users, scientific users, software developers, academics, and so forth.
Even when it comes to web browsing, traffic from non-desktop devices is generally only around 10% to 15% of a site's total traffic these days, for sites that aren't specifically targeting mobile users. The remaining 85% (or more) of traffic is coming from people who are, guess what, using web browsers implemented as desktop apps.
Unless the native apps are meant to be built with web technologies. It's not like using these technologies no a mobile OS is a new concept. And be wary of using something like iOS has a base for your assumptions. It's not built with those technologies in mind, and people already use HTML/JS/CSS for their apps (successfully, I might add).
They're flexible technologies, but don't think they'll ever have the feel of purpose built native API's.