Interesting, what native UI system is in your opinion easier to work with than web? Why then so many devs choose to use WebBrowser wrappers to render their desktop/mobile UIs because it's way faster and easier to develop with?
> Interesting, what native UI system is in your opinion easier to work with than web?
I'll answer that: every single one. I haven't ever seen a GUI system more complicated than the HTML/CSS/JS mess. The problem with these is that at first glance they look easy. Doing 'hello world' in HTML is little more than actually typing 'Hello world'. They only become a mess if you try to do something reasonably complex. The end result of this is that there are many people who start out with HTML and stick with it. They simply never experienced anything different.
> Why then so many devs choose to use WebBrowser wrappers to render their desktop/mobile UIs because it's way faster and easier to develop with?
No, it's cheaper to develop with. There are many more 'web developers' out there than mobile developers and they are usually very cheap to hire. The goal of corporations is not to build the best UI or to use the best tools, it is to make the most profit. A web-UI is usually considered good-enough by the suits and web 'developers' are a dime a dozen.
Which specific ones, for example? "Every one" could cover a lot of ground and doesn't have much information content. It's doubtful you have experience in every one, and it would be useful to know which specific ones have been tried and seem better.
AWT, Swing, Cocoa/CocoaTouch, Android, GTK+, QT, VCL, SWT, XAML, XUL, J2ME Polish are the one's I've used.
If I had to write a Web application I would probably start by writing a UI toolkit from scratch based on HTML5 Canvas and just bypass the whole HTML/CSS nastiness. I've written UI toolkits from scratch before (all the way down to the text rendering engine) and even that was probably less work than trying to work around HTML's mess.
The answer to your second question is manyfold. First, it makes a false presupposition, web development is not faster and easier. Second, most devs probably chose the browser as a platform because Apple was so tremendously successful at creating artificial "application barriers" -- making it uneconomical, problematic or even impossible to create well-behaving cross-platform applications. Building application barriers used to be Microsoft's primary concern (they invented the term for internal correspondence), they fought hard against Sun's original vision of Java, but has become Apple's main trump card for while, after Apple decided to give up making great and innovative hardware. Third, mobile apps became sexy but the fragmentation is too high (even just Android is way too fragmented).
So many devs and companies bite the bullet and decided to make a web page for desktop and mobile phones/tablets as a least common denominator.
If you disagree, show me one non-trivial web application with the performance and a user interface that matches or outscores a corresponding native application, and we can discuss why it's better than the rest and an exception. So far, I haven't seen a single example but there should be one or two.
Delphi 7 designer was a great improvement over delphi4 (we still use it at work) and yet delphi 2007 fixed some soap bugs and xe7+ is pretty decent as a cross platform ui development IDE.
You should try a newer version of the IDE/compiler. Delphi 10 Seattle and 10.1 Berlin are pretty damn good. Fast load times, editor is solid. The only real downside to the whole product is that the VCL (still) needs better layout management and easier ways to cope with scaling on high-DPI displays.
Many of those that use WebBrowser wrappers never used anything else other than web tools and aren't even aware of the RAD tooling we used like Delphi, for example.
