Peters: The Desktop or the Browser: Is the Netbook Escalating the Battle?

"Applications running natively on the desktop can provide a much better user experience than running an application inside a browser on top of the desktop. Mobile devices like phone and netbooks may make this obvious but the same holds true for a full size desktop."

This is probably true, but: applications inside the browser are improving all the time. And there are too many desktop systems to bother with making applications for them all. Heck, even linux distros aren't very compatible with each other. At the minimum you seem to need both GTK+ and Qt versions of the same app, or people complain. Such a waste of time, and you still need to multiply that by windows and os x versions if you are targeting the world as opposed to just Linux users. Even in mobile space, there are a number of platforms, so again app writes are forced to waste effort on porting between them, or settling for a fraction of the total market.

Anything that provides a single target is made of win, and currently the strange virtual machine composed of html, css and javascript with network connection to server is a more sensible idea than writing the code for any actual machine, unless the browser on that machine sucks, if that indeed is the case for mobile devices. I confess that I briefly tried the Android browser earlier this week and thought it felt entirely serviceable.

Outside the browser, there's things like python, java and .Net for making desktop apps in, and none of them seems to provide super good user experience. All start slowly, eat quite a bit of RAM, and you can't run that many of them simultaneously because every one of them insists in private memory footprints for everything, even the stuff they ought to share. Outside of these, you have to go for native stuff, with more porting problems.

Consequently, I find it very hard to believe that the browser would be in any hurry of dying out, even if browsers sucked on mobiles. I claim they don't suck that much, the apps improve and brower apps are probably still written before the other apps arrive, because web site simply serves everyone, including the mobile users.