>> I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a browser. I phone people in a browser. I video conference in a browser...

I do many of these things in a browser as well, not because the experience is so great, in fact, most of the time it's pretty horrible. Banking, photo management or video conferencing in the browser a great experience, really?

I sympathise with this article, and even though web applications have come a long way, I'm sometimes amazed by the collective cognitive dissonance that seems to be prevalent among people who develop web applications, pretending that all is fine and dandy in web application land, and we've long surpassed the point where web applications provide better experience than good native applications. They are simply nowhere near, and the fact that e.g. Google Mail (which is a great web application) is considered superior to e.g. something like Sparrow is quite frankly very amazing.

> the fact that e.g. Google Mail (which is a great web application) is considered superior to e.g. something like Sparrow is quite frankly very amazing

It's a good example actually. Even considering the less pretty UI, Google Mail is superior to Sparrow precisely because it is web-based. 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. And from the vendor's side, the ability to manage updates and monetise through ads are clear benefits which keep the program running.

>> 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.

Why are 'spam and search' difficult-to-impossible in a native app?

For that matter, why are you equating 'the web' and 'server-side'? The standads IMAP protocol stores messages server-side while also enabling effecient server-side search. The standard managesieve protocol implements support for managing server-side filters from remote clients. Tools such as SpamAssassin perform intelligent per-user filtering server-side.

At that point, the only real differences between webmail and native clients are:

- UX

- Native clients use standardized protocols by default.

For one thing Spamassassin is quite hopeless compared to Gmail's filter (and yes I have compared). But more to the point I would absolutely equate web with server-side hosted app. For example, if you want to implement decent search it's probably going to be Lucene-based. So if you are just talking thin-client presentation layer, the app isn't really native in any case - the acid test for a non-web app is whether it works without an internet connection. (Other major differences would be ubiquity and maintenance.)

I'm pretty confused. Are you saying that my mail client is non-native because it uses IMAP server-side search?

Even though it caches all e-mail locally, works offline, and it is a native app?

> I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a browser. I phone people in a browser. I video conference in a browser...

I'd be interested to hear how those tools stack up against their native (or cappuccino) counter-parts, because implicit in your argument is that all these attempts to extend the web into the application space are better (and have 'won') over traditional approaches to application development, which I can't say has been my experience, even for the 'best-in-breed' solutions such as Google Apps.

Personally, I've found the surge of interest in native development via mobile to be invigorating, since it has meant a resurgence in applications that put user experience ahead of dogma (or even cost). I can hope that this continues to carry over to the desktop and other spheres over the next 5 years.

The success of the web makes horrifyingly apparent how important ubiquity and ease of deployment are. In they quest for users, they trump almost everything else.

You don't have to install the browser based ones. Also, if they are decent at all, you can link to them.

You can push apps to your phone with a native app? Maybe if you're using iOS. You can reserve items at a library with a native app? Which one? I don't know of any; do you? What do you use to manage photos, iPhoto? Is it really that much more powerful than flickr -- or even Facebook?

For many web-based tools, there aren't cappuccino/desktop analogs. They just don't make sense.

I do my interactions with my bank in a browser, but my bank doesn't do the actual banking in a browser.

I could manage my photos in a browser, but I won't do "photoshopping" in a browser.

I watch movies in a browser, but I don't edit my home movies in a browser.

I listen to music in a browser, but I don't record or mix music in a browser.

I push apps to my smartphone in a browser, but I don't develop smartphone apps in a browser.

In general, I communicate or consume in a browser, but the worthy things - the creation - tends to happen outside of it.

Also, don't forget that all the things that consumers might ever see are just the tip of the iceberg - the vast majority of software and hardware development is done not for B2C apps/websites but for solutions that are B2B, business-process-internal or hidden in an appliance, never seen by any consumers.

I think you will end up doing every one of those things in a browser.

That browser will probably look less like a browser - since it does everything, it doesn't really need a window.

*Except for your bank doing your banking. Of course it will be offloading the work to a dedicated application. The rest, however, will be browser-based.

Enterprise B2B has started moving very strongly towards web-based apps in the last couple of years e.g. Salesforce

It's awesome for things involving communication and relationships (banking, purchasing, and so forth) and for accessing content (Youtube is my main music discovery service, for example).

But I don't like doing everything in a browser. All the things you mention are transactional, but when I'm (say) writing music I much prefer to be in a native environment because the transactional stuff is a much lower priority. It's distracting, for many tasks. At the very least, I want to run some things without a browser frame of tabs, URL bar and so on without necessarily doing so in full screen mode.

> At the very least, I want to run some things without a browser frame of tabs, URL bar and so on without necessarily doing so in full screen mode.

Have you ever tried a Chrome Platform App? They don't have any browser chrome--they're just regular app windows, painted with whatever the developer likes--but they're still running in a browser. Sort of similar to Air/Silverlight.

Actually I do most of that stuff in native mobile application now instead of in a browser.

Do you know why? Because the browser version sucks ass compared to the native version someone has designed for a phone UI. It makes me sick every time I pick up my phone to transfer money in my bank account while I sitting at a computer.