I'm not sure that "a decade-old game runs smoothly" would qualify as an innovation, rather than as a showcase of the exact problem the author was hinting at. Just getting stuff shoehorned into the browser that we already had running perfectly fine outside of it is not "innovation".
What about truly new stuff that nobody has seen before, neither inside browsers nor in native applications?
In 5 years, that’s my rough prediction. So long it will take for the browsers (with significant market share) to catch up with existing native features to combine them with the web. Then we have enough instances out there to use reliably:
- canvas + 3D support
- asm.js / WebAssembly: a way to run performant byte code
- WebRTC: Video chat, file transfer P2P
- APIs closer to the hardware like vibration, ambience, speech, ...
- stuff, that’s being developed but I don’t know yet, because the field has become so huge now. Small glimpse: http://caniuse.com/
And for developers it’s a single platform, together with distribution channel.
Apart from that: Truly innovative stuff happens on the web regularly. For example, look no further than Facebook (or Reddit, Imgur, Twitter, whatever you like). A software (in the broader sense), that allows billions of people to connect with each other and share thoughts. Imagine that in the age of SMS, phone books or snail-mail! You will see, that it’s fundamental to make something like social networks, the browsers had first to evolve from the bunch of hacks, that they were in the 90’s.
Another example of the power of browsers: FirefoxOS. A complete smartphone OS powered by web technologies on a thin Linux layer.
So my point is: the “truly new stuff” is partly already out there, you just have to look. And partly it will hit your devices, when the browsers are evolved enough. It’s a continuous process, and not a single “wait, there’s more...” (which doesn’t surprise the least, when you think of the _huge_ numbers of devices out there).
What about truly new stuff that nobody has seen before, neither inside browsers nor in native applications?