Electron / OpenFin
Desktop wrappers for web apps. The browser is the platform now.
Electron ships a full Chromium instance per application. OpenFin does the same but markets itself to financial services. Both solve a problem that modern browsers have already solved: running web applications with native-like capabilities.
PWAs, Web Workers, SharedArrayBuffer, and WebSockets give you everything you need for demanding desktop-class applications — including the real-time trading platforms that OpenFin targets. The memory overhead of bundling a browser inside a browser is absurd when the user already has Chrome open.
We've built complex financial dashboards that run entirely in the browser with better performance than their Electron predecessors. The maintenance burden alone — keeping Chromium up to date, managing auto-updates, platform-specific builds — makes these wrappers a liability.