>> From the user's side, the way it deals with spam and search are two huge functional advantages which would be difficult to impossible in a native app. You c

>> From the user's side, the way it deals with spam and search are two huge functional advantages which would be difficult to impossible in a native app. You can configure Sparrow (or whatever native e-mail client) to simply connect to your GMail inbox and have all the spam filtering and search capabilities that GMail has. Even the default Mail.app on OS X and iOS (which isn't exactly feature rich otherwise) does this. As much as I like GMail as a service, their web front-end is actually the part I dislike most about it, which is why I almost never use it. >> And from the vendor's side, the ability to manage updates and monetise through ads are clear benefits which keep the program running. Well, first of all I don't like ads and I don't care about how service providers can monetize it because it's web-based. I'd much rather pay a monthly fee for the service and/or a one-time price for the app, than having a web UI full of crap I didn't ask for. Not a very strong positive for web-apps. As far as updates are concerned, I understand that a web-based service is much more flexible in that regard, but then again, it's not really hard to have self-updating native applications either.