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Web apps: taking five years to get to where desktop apps were a decade earlier?
- karzeem 19y agoThere are certain types of apps that will probably never reside in a browser, and certainly never with AJAX. Heavy-duty stuff like Final Cut Pro and the Adobe CS springs immediately to mind. I know a lot of people use GMail as their primary mail client, but to me, it can't touch Mac Mail. From a UI perspective, freedom from the browser is the ultimate trump card. Obviously, there are plenty of apps that make more sense to have exclusively on the web (like, say, the good old Google search engine), but there's a lot that will always belong on the desktop. The mistake AJAX zealots make is an overly broad view of the web's value. The web is valuable as a back end. That's it. As a front end for apps, the desktop's possibilities are comparatively limitless. If, for instance, Word featured remote access and collaboration (i.e. use the web as its back end), Google Docs would be in serious trouble. The same goes for almost every major desktop app (including OSes) whose death knell the web 2.0 crowd is so eager to ring. In the next few years, using the web simply as a back end for the desktop is going to be a huge area of innovation.