Ask Slashdot: What's the Future of Desktop Applications?

MrNaz writes: Over the last fifteen years or so, we have seen the dynamic web mature rapidly. The functionality of dynamic web sites has expanded from the mere display of dynamic information to fully fledged applications rivaling the functionality and aesthetics of desktop applications. Google Docs, MS Office 365, and Pixlr Express provide in-browser functionality that, in bygone years, was the preserve of desktop software.

The rapid deployment of high speed internet access, fiber to the home, cable and other last-mile technologies, even in developing nations, means that the problem of needing offline access to functionality is becoming more and more a moot point. It is also rapidly doing away with the problem of lengthy load times for bulky web code.

My question: Is this trend a progression to the ultimate conclusion where the browser becomes the operating system and our physical hardware becomes little more than a web appliance? Or is there an upper limit: will there always be a place where desktop applications are more appropriate than applications delivered in a browser? If so, where does this limit lie? What factors should software vendors take into consideration when deciding whether to build new functionality on the web or into desktop applications?

Comments

Bad Idea

[BrendaEM]

Stuff like this is marketing people's dream: dependence. Though, seen through the eyes of marketing people, they only consider the small select applications they use, but those office applications are only a small part of what people use.

Applications like CAD, Design, Bitmap Editing, 2D vector art applications would run terribly slow over the net.

The things people use to make your stuff would become more expensive as it is starting to happen, and those costs will be passed onto you.

It would be a bad computer world where would could not afford a company to throw the switch, and discontinue your product in one day with no warning.

If there was a disaster or real war (on our soil), no one would be able to work, at all, because there would be concentrated central points of failure.

Re:See it before

[bondsbw]

Computers users in the 80s and 90s were a different breed in general than today's users. For most users today, an iPad is good enough for just about anything they will ever want to do.

This again?

[TheDarkMaster]

Again this bullshit?

- Flawless 24/7 connection to the internet is plain impossible and any application that does not take this into consideration is a piece of shit;

- Your data on a third-party server is always a security problem waiting to happen;

- Browsers cannot provide the exact same features of a native application without the idea of them being completely rethink;

- When a web application has successfully emulate a desktop application it usually costs double or triple in computational resources to do the same thing as a native application;

- HTML is not designed for making desktop GUI applications, it need a ridiculous amount of very ugly hacks do to things that are done easily using native GUIs;

That said, of course there are tasks where a web application is useful... But it is foolish to believe that so any task task can be done in a web application.