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Or just use emscripten-qt.

5 years? No, it's already been done.

You can run KDE applications in your browser, right now.

Just so long as no-one ports KDE to JavaScript. That really would be going too far.

Client-side is a mess. Everything needs to be built (at least) three times, once for the web, Android, and iOS. In the browser you have to content with JavaScript, browser API’s,CSS, and rendering differences.

if your application looks the same on a webpage as it does on a smartphone then YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. Hell, if your application is on a webpage then almost assuredly, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

If you are writing a desktop, tablet, mobile or server-side application, you can use Qt to do it all.

- desktop: OS integration, sound, graphics (transparently software or hardware based), multi-touchscreen support (for tablets)
- mobile: Android/iPhone ports, multi-touchscreen support, direct display buffer access and more.
- server: execute as a daemon, handling TCP/UDP directly, talking over D-Bus

On a side note: someone wrote black magic code and ported Qt to javascript. If it's run locally, it's ok but otherwise it's a huge download. Here are some demos like Tetrix

Client-side is a mess. Everything needs to be built (at least) three times, once for the web, Android, and iOS. In the browser you have to content with JavaScript, browser API’s,CSS, and rendering differences.

if your application looks the same on a webpage as it does on a smartphone then YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. Hell, if your application is on a webpage then almost assuredly, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

If you are writing a desktop, tablet, mobile or server-side application, you can use Qt to do it all.

- desktop: OS integration, sound, graphics (transparently software or hardware based), multi-touchscreen support (for tablets)
- mobile: Android/iPhone ports, multi-touchscreen support, direct display buffer access and more.
- server: execute as a daemon, handling TCP/UDP directly, talking over D-Bus

On a side note: someone wrote black magic code and ported Qt to javascript. If it's run locally, it's ok but otherwise it's a huge download. Here are some demos like Tetrix

Qt doesn't get out much beyond Win/Lin/Mac.

Qt isn't available for enough platforms because it only runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Blackberry, Kindle, vXWorks, BSD, Solaris, Haiku, WebOS, OS/2, Tizen and AmigaOS? Anything that passes the "does it run on Amiga?" test is good enough for me.

You forgot qt in a browser: http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emscripten-qt/wiki/Demos

Qt isn't available for enough platforms because it only runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Blackberry, Kindle, vXWorks, BSD, Solaris, Haiku, WebOS, OS/2, Tizen and AmigaOS? Anything that passes the "does it run on Amiga?" test is good enough for me.

And HTML5 + JS, of course :)

If we're going to use "sessionStorage, localStorage, and client-side databases" (as per TFA), why not just use an executable? Write the thing in .NET or Java or C

One of the appealing reasons for transitioning everything to the web is ease of portability (when standards are followed) the browser is your middleware. You do bring up a good point about the fat client. In the days of yore there was mainframe computing and arguably like real estate there are cycles, however, client/server model never really disappeared (Citrix). Thin clients are once again in the spotlight but the market isn't fully there yet (see the chrome book) and may not jump on it. The merits of these systems is another discussion. Regarding going the "traditional" binary route for (web) applications, you are now supporting multiple platforms. There is a lot of work involved to make this happen. QA for installers is an instant turn off personally, and now you've got Win32 & Win64, OSX, iOS (7 is coming), Android (Many flavors) and the churn of progress for each of these platforms with depricated apis, exceptions etc.

Traditional development aside there are many exciting things happening on the web side of things, I'm not sure if you've kept up with ASM.js or Emscripten. The gist, this allows compilers to export to JS where the application (written in C or Qt for example) is accessed via your browser. It's still in its infancy. However, with the increases made to JS engines in browsers these things are now possible and gaining traction. We shall see what the future holds, from an academic standpoint I think it's cool to see Quake done in JS.

There are also client heavy sites (take a look at USAToday.com) which use Backbone.js or other variants to achieve something really slick.

Another question: do modern day browsers encrypt cookies? I don't know for sure, but I suspect they don't.

No, this is left up to the developer. As an aside, there are frameworks which provide functionality like this out of the box.

I'm a programmer, but not a web developer.

I'm not certain what your background is, but if you're a Java guy you might be interested in the Play Framework. Fast iteration and you can get started pretty quickly. For the record I'm not affiliated with this project. If you're interested in something typesafe and different check out a Haskell based framework such as snap.

http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html -- Have fun :)

"right now there's a daily VM image floating around" Here, in fact:

http://dot.kde.org/1195829316/
http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html

I actually love KDE, but the Kopete interface is quite too much cluttered in my opinion. However I sometimes try it and the latest versions are not as bad as the old ones.

It's very rough around the edges (as I got tied up with work, and couldn't continue to work on it :( ), but it works decently enough, although the provided listings are occasionally wrong. Here's a screenie.