This is more a case of "old is still old", I think. We've been hearing about how web apps or browser-based apps will replace desktop apps for many years now, yet it never happens.

I can still remember all of the Java applet, ActiveX control and DHTML hype of the late 1990s. It died out when it was proven to be nonsense. Desktop apps continued to thrive.

Then it built up again a few years later, during the middle of the last decade, when AJAX and jQuery became all the rage. These offerings were marginally better than what we saw in the DHTML era, but still lacking. The only traction they gained was at the very low end. Most serious users still preferred to use real desktop applications.

Now it's a few years later, and there's been a lot of HTML5 hype. Yet the browser-based apps are still no closer to replacing desktop apps. Gmail, for instance, has been around for almost a decade, but a great many people much prefer a real mail client. We also haven't seen much traction when it comes to modern online office suites, and other web-based alternatives to more traditional desktop apps.

Native desktop or mobile apps are going to be around for a long time. I question whether it is even possible for any browser-based app to compete. In order to do so effectively, it would be necessary to eliminate the browser itself, as it is the browser and its related technologies which provide the poor experience we get from many web apps. It just looks like a complete no-win situation for web apps, aside from perhaps at the very low end.

This is all anecdotes unless someone's done a survey, but in my experience very few people use a native app for email anymore. I do so, but can't think of a single other person I know who does. Almost everyone's on Gmail, and a lot of people only do IM (Gchat, Facebook Chat) in the browser, too. And there was never a native desktop app for Facebook, but that didn't prevent it from getting a billion users. Likewise, where's the native app for YouTube? We all used to download videos and then watch them in native video players. Not anymore.

Maybe it's a matter of age — I suspect you might be a little older than me and the crowd I hang out with (mostly mid-20s). From my vantage point web apps have obviously already replaced many categories of native apps, and are on the way to replace more. It seems as if you are denying something that already happened.

I think a lot of people who have only been exposed to web based email don't realize what they're missing in a good native client. I have several friends in that mid/late-20s age range that went to work in corporate jobs, used Outlook 2010 for the first time, and then asked me for help getting their personal Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail accounts working with Outlook because they like doing email there so much more once they learn to use it well.

edit: BTW, I see your comment was downvoted while I was writing mine. I just wanted to say that I did not downvote yours; you make good points about Facebook and YouTube, to be sure.

Outlooks is so much worse than gmail in almost every way. The only good thing about it for work is integration with all the other MS applications. My experience with Outlook after many years of gmail has been nothing but frustrating, and I hear the same story everywhere.

I'm genuinely curious what you mean by "almost every way".

I use the Gmail web interface daily because its keyboard shortcuts for labeling, archiving, and deleting are unbeatable for triaging my inbox, but it pales in comparison to Outlook 2007, 2010, and 2013 for composing and scheduling (and I schedule against an Apps for Business account, not Exchange). In particular, pinning search folders like "Unread Mail" to the "favorites" area is invaluable to me because I filter a lot of my mail with "skip inbox" and "keep unread" so lower priority mail doesn't clutter my inbox or distract me with push alerts, but I want easy access to it later. I've tried using g + l "unread" in the Gmail web interface to replace that, many times, but the experience is just so much worse that I don't find it usable at all.

I use both, and I think a lot of people in my age group (30s) are the same way. Gmail is for low-importance things generally I don't need to read, like order confirmations and the random lists I get on because I gave my address to some site. Apple Mail is for stuff I care about - work, personal projects, family relationships, and other serious topics that are worth investing time in.

Gmail has top-notch spam detection, and there's no need to wait while thousands of emails download, which is great. As for negatives, I find the GMail interface to be cluttered and confusing, with its ads, the annoying black bar at the top, random hovering elements, and the occasional exhortation to Buzz / gchat / new Compose experience / whatever it is this week. The UI is unpleasant to spend extended periods in, which isn't conducive to thoughtfulness. Also, its search is bad ("1-20 of many"), so I am uncomfortable storing important data in it.

It's part of a larger pattern. The web is for large quantities of stuff, with low signal to noise; desktop apps are for focusing. I read blog posts on the web, I read books with a native app. I watch cat videos on YouTube, I watch movies with native players. I think this separation is robust.

Incidentally, YouTube does have a native iOS app, which I find to be much better than the web site on my iPad. The same is true for Hulu, NetFlix, and ABC's player. Oh, and Facebook!

> The web is for large quantities of stuff, with low signal to noise; desktop apps are for focusing

Interesting point, noted!

> YouTube does have a native iOS app, which I find to be much better [..] on my iPad

Yup, hence my spelling out that there's no native desktop app. With mobile apps we have a few confounding factors:

* less-powerful processors that may be unacceptably slowed down by the HTML/JS layer

* immaturity of multitouch and notification APIs in JavaScript

* limited (if any?) support for putting pure web apps on your home screen, or in an app store

As the APIs mature and tablet and smartphone processors get faster, I expect there to be fewer and fewer reasons to do fully-native apps. But yes, of course, they do offer a better experience today.

I went from using a webapp exclusively for email, back to a traditional client. The reason was that the webapp didn't expose enough functionality, and I couldn't change the top-posting default value. Joining several email lists where bottom-posting was the norm, it made sense to adapt to that, and I ended up adopting Thunderbird. Prior to that, I hadn't used a "traditional" email client since pine and Pegasus Mail in the late 90s.

In my experience people tend to use webmail for personal and native for business. I guess because native mail clients can be a pain to setup unless you understand IMAP , Port numbers yadayada. Also people don't use personal email much apart from in a few instances whereas for business it is the defacto communication method.

Using the gmail web interface for work email would drive me nuts. Email can be pretty important to me so it's something that needs to be omnipresent on my desktop.

This is where thunderbird integrated with Ubuntu/Unity is perfect. When I have a new email I get to see the sender and subject instantly on the top right of the screen, the notification icon lights up and the launcher icon tells me how many unread emails I have.

If I were using gmail I would have to keep a tab open and would spend half of the day OCD switching tabs to check if I had anything important.

Of course you could fix this by adding notification features to gmail that integrate with the desktop and showing it in a window that is distinct from my other browser windows.

But then is it really a web app or is it a desktop app that happens to be written in JS?

I'm not certain that you appreciate how crucial and widespread native email clients are in the business and academic worlds, both on the desktop and on mobile devices.

Maybe these users do have personal Hotmail or Gmail accounts. However, for anything serious and work-related, they're very likely using Outlook, Lotus Notes, Mail.app, Thunderbird, or one of the numerous other native email clients.

Many people, especially those in management, sales, accounting, finance or other communication-heavy areas of business, often spend many hours each workday using a native email client, on both the desktop and on mobile devices.

Within technical and academic circles, and also the open source community, many people prefer native email clients because they're so much more powerful than the web-based clients.

Furthermore, I personally know a lot of people who have an @gmail.com account, but they essentially always use it from a native client via IMAP and SMTP, rather than using the web interface. They use it mainly because it's free, and because of its large storage space, rather than because of its web interface.

The netflix example is interesting. I recently installed with super-hacky Netflix for Ubuntu PPA (works surprisingly well, but can cause your screensaver to activate). It's basically just windows firefox wrapped in a custom version of wine.

The important thing though is that it launches fullscreen and attaches to the unity dock as an independent application whereas with Windows it's just a website that you browse to.

I think that the way it integrates on Ubuntu actually makes much more sense in many ways. Though VLC integration would obviously be the most superior option.

"Now it's a few years later, and there's been a lot of HTML5 hype."

Since there is no real choice of what language to use on client side nowadays it is easier to pretend and say that HTML and JS are awesome.

I think things are still moving in the direction we expected.

Java applets and ActiveX were horrible experiences, that's why they didn't survive, not because desktop apps are fundamentally better. And DHTML is just a different name for webpages that use Javascript - that was doing pretty well last time I checked.

Google Docs and Gmail replaced traditional desktop apps for me a long time ago. Sure, not everyone has moved, and it will certainly be a long time before the enterprise sector throws out their desktop apps, but in the consumer space many people just use web based mail clients. According to year old Litmus stats [0] 31% of email was webmail (and how much of the outlook traffic is from office workers?).

Xero have done an amazing job of pushing into a space dominated by and old desktop app (Sage). People are moving, slowly but surely.

I know that desktop apps are not going to vanish soon but it's not fair to say that web apps haven't gained much traction.

Any issues you're seeing in the experience at the moment will be smoothed out. There's mind boggling amounts of resource being poured into making web apps faster (V8 etc) and the emerging frameworks for rich interfaces (Angular etc) are going to enable a whole new breed of web app.

[0] http://litmus.com/blog/email-client-market-share-stats-infog...