Email client: Whether or not you wanted JS, your competitor works offline, retries better when connection is not good, persists emails without having to save, live refreshes emails when received, sends notifications, allows drag and drop to organize emails, autocomplete email addresses, works in SSO, have a nice text editor with spellchecking, autocomplete, bold and italic text. You lost.
Banking: your competitor handles nicely dynamic forms, with helpful field validation, asking users just the right amount of questions based on what you entered previously, without changing page, with a go back button just working great. They also live refresh transactions, provide some nice clickable spending graphs, have a nice live dynamic wire confirmation system provide in-website live chat with your advisor. Their session doesn't expire every 15min for security reasons. You lost.
Actually I really love the old fashioned cubemail type
interface. Faster to load, more predictable interface where opening in another tab is a thing. I am rarely in a offline situation and if I am I connect a traditional email client that apple provides on my iphone anyway.
Banking - again same kind of argument.
Non JS infused apps have a certain solidness about them. I think it is the predictability. An interactive site will have whatever original UX innovations that team came up with.
Case in point in HN you can paste arbitrary text into a comment without it fucking up. Impossible on Reddit! If I paste there the comment box is now forever fucked until I reload. I need to do the old notepad middleman trick.
Your you lost comments are odd, it is horses for courses always.
Cubemail is 80% tinymce and queryui on the rendering front. We have different sensibility, Having notifications / autorefresh / working on mobile is more important to me that a predictable, static and stale interface.
About the copy and paste situation, having implemented a text editor myself, JS is of great help to handle copy and paste. Just letting the platform do what it does via the text entry of the copy buffer has some underwhelming behavior that are seen as bugs.
Banking: your competitor handles nicely dynamic forms, with helpful field validation, asking users just the right amount of questions based on what you entered previously, without changing page, with a go back button just working great. They also live refresh transactions, provide some nice clickable spending graphs, have a nice live dynamic wire confirmation system provide in-website live chat with your advisor. Their session doesn't expire every 15min for security reasons. You lost.