The Browser is No Place for Multitasking

Reading my feeds I came across this little snippet:

Why We Need Web Apps on the Desktop - ReadWriteWeb:

As Mitch Grasso, founder of Sliderocket (our coverage) wrote in a comment here yesterday, "Adobe AIR isn't just about taking apps offline. Multi-window support, drag and drop, keyboard shortcuts, and access to the rich clipboard are all things that you take for granted in a desktop app are difficult or impossible to do in a browser. Browsers are designed for reading webpages - not hosting applications."

There might be a day when the web truly is our operating system, and when browsers really will be designed to run multiple applications. But that day hasn't arrived, and until it does, bringing web apps to the desktop is another important step in their evolution and the way forward in pushing the idea of hosting data in the cloud out to the mainstream.

A while back I wrote The webtop - back in time? and I still think there is a reason for offering some service in the form as a webapp and there is a reason for desktop applications. Squeezing everything into the limited runtime environment that is the browser is not a good thing. We have better capabilities on the desktop and there is no need to get back in time and tie ourselves again to some kind of mainframe. It doesn't matter whether that happens over a wire or with a wireless connection - it's the same.

Maybe the bad experiences with a certain operating system that is plagued with viruses, worms, and trojan horses made people fall in love with the safety of a sandboxed environment named Firefox. I can understand that. But is that a good compelling reason for going back in time and seek salvation in the arms of mainframes and terminals? I don't think so.

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