Comments on: Are Web Apps an Endangered Species?

By: skierpage

skierpage — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:42:38 +0000

I wish my native apps worked as well as web apps in Firefox: ubiquitous text selection, spell-checking in every field, smart zooming, superb auto-update, user data cleanly separated in profiles, and powerful notions like bookmarking, caching, etc. But they don’t, they’re CRAP in comparison. I hate leaving the browser to screw around in native apps like iTunes, media players, and Norton Justshootme Virus. Then, to add insult to injury, these native apps are peppered with web links that don’t have Firefox’s context menu and so lack vital commands like “Bookmark this link” and “Copy link location”.

If app developers were smart, they’d realize that their users’ dominant application is the web browser, so they’d write apps that match the web browser. Mozilla isn’t pushing XULRunner apps that reuse my Firefox 3 runtime, but those are the only apps “outside” the browser I want to run. Die sucky .EXEs, die, die!!

By: John Allsopp

John Allsopp — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:03:49 +0000

Safari 4 appears to (not seen, only seen screenshots around the traps) a “Save as Webapp” menu item. There’s your SDK right there

By: Adil Allawi

Adil Allawi — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:39:46 +0000

The real question is – “is Mozilla an endangered species?” Unless the open web can develop into an application platform, proprietary systems like Air, Silverlight and JavaFX will dominate the future devices. Anyway, I think the future for web apps is rosy. Projects like Google Web Toolkit show that web app development is catching up fast with native app development. Latest web standards (HTML 5 and SVG) are beginning to match everything that is possible in native environments. And Asus embedding Linux in its motherboards means a whole group of cheap devices that will only have a web browser for application delivery.