Well when you get a small game like this especially when checking out a hundred games submitted for a jam you don't usually plan to spend a lot of time with it. So you want as little obstacles on your player's way to actually playing as possible. Installing requires a lot of extra steps (compared to running in browser or having a simple exe file), plus after I finish with all these games I don't want to have to uninstall each one of them separately.
For instance in my game I had an HTML version of it, but it turned out that it has negative effect on the visuals, and as it was becoming more important for the game (after I added post processing) I decided that a video will be enough to entie people to download the zip archive and play the game.
Do you think I should have used an HTML version for my submission?
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Well, Air Hoops is intended to be more than just a small game you play for a bit, so I created an installer to "professionalize" the game. And about your question - I always prefer using exe files instead of playing on the browser. However, it's sometimes scary to install and run an unknown file, so that's a plus to HTML games.