This is a great point and I appreciate you pointing it out. Cross platform development is hard regardless of which part of the stack you're developing for. The reason development for the browser stands out for me is that when I build a web app I can control to a certain extent what environment the server is deployed in and then I don't have to worry too much about different platforms. However I have no control over which browser my user chooses to use and that can have a serious impact on their experience. An impact that I have to account for.

It's pretty easy to control, just detect which browser and throw up a screen saying that browser isn't supported or "use at your own risk." I don't see any distinction between cross platform support and cross browser support.

That is not support, that is denial of service and isnt an option for most webpages.

C has a much bigger baggage. I assume a big chunk of C is modern version of compilers is fairly gotcha free. But even the core basic part of Web is full of gotcha. Just the fact that you need to start with a normalize.css is reason enough. And as they fix compatibility in 1 things, they seem to add 10 more.

Maybe I'm wrong and clueless. But web seems to be a bastion for adding overly complex solutions while failing at trivial things often enough not always. I agree it is probably still the cheapest way to get a cross platform GUI at least maintenance wise. But it is a pile of electricity sucking horrendous crap regardless or at least a big part of it. More frustratingly I'm not sure that it has to be the case.

As someone who came from "native" gui development and has only really been doing web stuff seriously for a few years, it's pretty easy now, particularly if you don't need to support IE, and even IE11 isn't _too_ much of a pain. I've never used a normalize.css for example.