Why don’t more developers “use the platform”?

For years, advocates for web standards, performance, and accessibility have implored web developers to “use the platform”. I’ve often been one of those advocates. The argument is simple: why build something yourself, in JavaScript, when the browser can do it for you? Whatever you build, it’s likely to have poorer performance and worse usability than something the browser could just give you out-of-the-box. I think it’s worth taking the other side, though, if for no other reason than to understand where the “platform-skeptic” developers are coming from. If “use the platform” is so obvious, then why do so many people seem to need convincing? The most obvious reason is historical: for the longest time, browsers were playing catch-up with the ecosystem on top of them. Libraries like jQuery filled crucial gaps while browsers implemented equivalent APIs – and even then, you might have to wait for laggards like IE6 to age out before you could actually use them. Today, most browsers are…