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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?
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?
In the 80s and 90s. X terminals and the like. Sooner or later the users want their power back. It will be interesting to see what happend this time around.
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
There will always be a need for those who want to keep what they are doing private. It's not private if it's not local and even then it may not be private.
Until only a few years ago, electricity was the only thing that one needed to use a computer productively. Now there are so many dependencies all of the way from device drivers to intermediate pieces of equipment and services, that there are a whole lot of things that can cause the function to stop.
I only use online features because they're free-as-in-beer along with their ease of access. If either changes then there's no reason to continue using an online version.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The fact that this question gets asked basically every year should more than sufficiently answer the question.
Office 365 is a poor example. The web interface has definitely come a long way, but any serious work falls over. Maybe they'll get there, but for now, local apps integrated with the cloud backend seem to work better.
Write now I definitely wouldn't want to try working with RAW photos from a DSLR or edit high bitrate 4K video using a web app. Maybe in ten years, but then again, those digital formats will probably have moved on to another level by then too.
Oh and email: there's still definitely a need for offline access. Be it a tradition MUA or when on a mobile phone. Online isn't online enough even for this.
Single point of failure and security. Some applications might lend themselves to running exclusively in a browser and some will not.
Sorry, in my experience these web based applications are crap, and they started around the .com era where suddenly everybody thought everything belonged on the web.
The "problem of needing offline access" most certainly has not been solved, and not all of us want our data in the cloud.
If the web browser is going to become our operating system, we're fucked -- because we'll all be running garbage code which covers some of the use-cases, but which generally has terrible interfaces as we try to shoehorn every problem into something which doesn't lend itself to the web.
Many of us have lamented the move to web-first technologies as a byproduct of lazy corporations writing mediocre software.
If you think the end of desktop applications is nigh, I sincerely hope you're wrong -- because the endless stream of crap web pages which almost work is getting tedious.
And it mostly ends up in greedy corporations more worried about analytics and advertising, than writing usable software which actually solves the problems.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Most any data-driven desktop app can be rebuilt for the web, but the same can't be said the same for apps that depend on local resources outside of a browser's limited environment. Could you ever imagine pro video editing (i.e. Adobe Premiere / After Effects) 100% within Chrome?
through my browser or half installed program on my computer or I have to be online within 30 days no thanks, go and die already.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Eventually people will get fed up with paying $4.99 in perpetuity to a dozen or more vendors, and we'll have single pay licensing again. Legislative changes relating to data protection will complicate cloud migration for some professions, and I imagine state spying is starting to have economic impact.
I've seen the cycles too; the difference there is a legion of programmers and a even bigger pile of code out there. Computers (hardware) are also trending to very low cost now as well.
Software trends to zero in volume as there's no marginal cost; I'd expect more and more core functionality to be free. This has already happened to some degree in the Apple ecosystem, and Microsoft is bundled with everything.
Another prediction: More and more functionality will come bundled into the OS, and you can factor on paying a subscription for it (or the fee when you upgrade).
You want to jump on the next big rage? Nice, clean applications, web based or not, devoid of crapware and malware and in-app-purchases and ads that do what they're supposed to, cleanly, nothing more, and easily connect together through standard interfaces. It's almost like someone built something like that before.
On the other hand, no application is complete until it has an email client..
..don't panic
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.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Everyone thinks the cloud is great - till the backhoe goes through your fiber line and you either don't have a backup data connection due to the fiber cut being down the street, or you do have a backup data connection but it doesn't have the capacity to handle everyone running on the cloud. There are many points in the country where even if your ISP does have a backup, you will be down for quite some time while they reroute (and everyone else is trying to reroute as well). When most ISPs in town use the same trunks to get to the real world, you don't even really have many choices for redundancy.
People who live in silicon valley and some countries with really good overall connectivity to all users are spoiled with many options. Out in the flyover area, things are tougher. Then think of places with even less connectivity than the US has.
Keeping the company up and running by keeping the data local has a lot of advantages.
Simple programs used by the general public could conceivably be served from the cloud to a browser
Even for those simple things, many people will still prefer local data and local control
I find it hard to imagine that serious stuff like CAD, video editing, digital audio workstations, etc could ever be forced into this model
I, for one, require local data, local software and local control..and I will NEVER rent software
... at work recently. Bunch of crap the whole of them.
One basically only works reliably in Firefox, one only in IE, one only in Chrome. And then of course there is the problem that one other needs an option in Chrome set to "on", the other needs that same option set to "off" to work.
So at the moment it seems any more complex "web" application I look at basically needs it's on sandboxed browser to not interfere with all your other web applications, and the whole internet itself. And at that point, HTML is a pretty bad abstraction layer for GUIs compared to some of the desktop GUI frameworks.
The only technical plus side is that you "don't have to install anything on the client", but since we have Remote desktop server with "dumb" terminals anyway that is a moot point for us, we don't need to install anything on the client anyway.
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.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I run a company that develops a laboratory informatics platform for data intensive science applications that mix wet lab and analytics operations into single workflows, with gene sequencing as the motivating application - think LIMS with a pipeline and visualization engine, if you're familiar with the space. (Lab7 Systems, if you're curious - http://www.lab7.io/
When we started development a few years ago, we had to make the decision as to whether or not to build a desktop application or a browser-based application. At the time, this wasn't an easy decision. Some aspects of the UI are straightforward form-style interfaces, but others are graphics heavy visualizations of very large data sets (100+ GB in some cases). Scientific and information visualization have almost always benefitted from local graphics contexts and native rendering engines. In addition, the data decomposition tasks often require efficient implementations in compiled languages. Our platform also controls analysis processes on large clusters, another task not well suited for the browser.
We gambled a bit and decided that the browser would be our primary user interface. Two trends at the time helped us make the decision (and luckily they both held steady):
(1) The JavaScript engines in all the major browsers get faster with each new release and now outperform other scripting languages for many tasks.
(2) The JavaScript development community is maturing, with more well-engineered and stable libraries available
As few other considerations helped us make the call:
(1) Our platform is a multi-user system. A desktop client would add to the support burden for our customers.
(2) Our backend needs to integrate with compute clusters, scientific instruments, and large, high-performance file systems. It is server-based, regardless of the client.
(3) The data scales we were dealing with also required "out-of-core" (to use an older term) algorithms for redenering, so the client would never get entire data sets at once.
(4) REST/json... XML, XMLRPC, SOAP, and all the others are a pain to develop for (I speak from experience), REST/json significantly reduced the amount of code we needed to maintain state between the client and server.
Since we made the call to use the browser, we haven't looked back. Early on there were some user interactions that were tricky to implement across all browsers, but today they've all caught up. Our application looks much more like a desktop or (*shudder*) Flash application, with a very rich UI (designed by an actual UX team that gets scientific software ;) ) and complex visualizations. It's also been relatively straight-forward to implement, thanks in large part to the maturity of some JavaScript libraries (we use jQuery, D3 (for complex filtering, but not for visualization), Canvas, Backbone, and a few others).
Personally, I can't imagine ever writing a desktop application again. The browser is just too convenient and, in the last few years, finally powerful enough for most tasks.
-Chris
I am sick of hearing about how desktop apps are dead. How am I supposed to develop embedded applications through a web browser? I suppose a cloud compiler could do it --- assuming it supports my extreme customizations, and even then, I can't imagine how slow it'd be.
What about network tools? My open source project is a network test utility: http://packetsender.com/. How can network test utilities exist other than a native desktop app? Am I supposed to create a browser add-on? Now we are just arguing semantics. Depending how deep the add-on is developed, might as well call that native.
The app world is more than just a means to consume video, music, etc. Some people need to do real work.
Please, understand this categorical statement: I DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING CLOUD SERVICE.
I do not want to rely on an internet connection to generate any trivial document.
I do not want even my meaningless documents stored "in the cloud", much less anything any private or commercial value.
I'm uninterested in making something simple, quick, and reliable into something complicated with more points of failure, slower, and unreliable (that in the meanwhile makes me dependent on you, and paying you for the privilege).
So no, stop asking.
-Styopa
Gamers will attest to running game logic server side not working for certain types of games because latency is too high. Going forward augmented reality and virtual reality have even lower latency requirement. With some latency requirements getting under 5 ms the actual physics (speed of light) starts to prevent everything from running remotely.
Perhaps even more important is the further you send bits the more power it consumes. Bits in registers use the least power. Bits in cache are still low power. Bits in memory start to consume lots of power. Going all the way out to flash is really getting bad. Then going over a network -- forget about it. Very roughly speaking each one of those steps is an order of magnitude more power today. The power consumption over a network will certainly be reduced in the future. However, it will be a long time before we get to the point where high bandwidth consumption over a network is low enough power that there won't be important cases you want to optimize by bringing data frequently used data locally and have some significant processing of it.
Absolutely this.
There is a huge difference between content production and content consumption. I do both. When I'm out and about checking Facebook or reading my email and so forth, I don't need a desktop app. I can get by just fine doing all of my online shopping with a tablet or even my phone. Hell, I use the built in app on my Blu-ray player to stream my Netflix movies. Outside of some very specific tasks (and not counting work), I live most of my life without having to touch a desktop app.
But when I'm at work or when I'm doing some very specific development tasks at home, there is nothing better than a desktop application. There's absolutely no need for an online web based system for developing and integrating the embedded software I work on. In fact, having to use a web service would just be an extra level of complexity that does nothing but get in the way. That's not to say that having a local network to work over is bad. In fact, local networking capable tools greatly eases the job. But having to go through some 3rd party's web server for everything we did would get in the way more than help. The ancillary tools also have no need to be anything but a standard desktop application. A good quality desktop publishing system that makes Word look like the child's toy that it is would be best suited to being a desktop application. Again, there's no benefit to going through someone's web server to do tasks that can easily be done locally. The added layer of complexity would just add one (or more) extra failure point(s) that have no business getting in the way of getting work done. And that's all before you get into the limited UI that you get through a web interface compared to a dedicated desktop application.
The desktop is going away in the home. While it was all you had back in the days of 486's and Pentiums, the entire industry has evolved. For personal home use, there's really no need to have much beyond a tablet. Throw in a docking keyboard and you can pretty much do everything you want at home with web based services and simple tablet apps. So for the average home user there's nothing wrong with the desktop going away. But when it comes to getting real work done, like professional software development, video editing, and any number of other complex work, the desktop is basically impossible to beat and it's not going anywhere.
Right now the limits are in High End Graphic Processing, and Interfacing with external hardware.
And user interface in general. I've yet to see a web-based UI that even comes close to being as good as a well-developed native one.
Richard Stallman covered this subject in detail, it is important reading: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
I am surprised this would even be asked here. The fact is, if you care about security and privacy, you dont want to use anything other than desktop apps. You want to avoid anything such as Google Docs for your normal letter writing and so on. One area of confusion is that people have problems drawing a distinction between which is where you share things that you want other people to see, versus a tax spreadsheet that no one else should see. With the social networking the material is sort of not private anyway and you want to share it so little is lost by putting it on a server farm, and it is necessary that it be shared with others so the server farm facilitates the communications.
With a desktop application where you are working on tax spreadsheets or working on other things that will not be shared, there is no need to put it on a server some place else, so why do it? In so doing you give up a huge amount of potential privacy, increasing the technical possibilities of a possible access of the material on the server farm by other entities.
Using this cloud stuff you lose control of your data. The cloud provider could pull the plug on the service at any time (and it happens, look at Google Code and Geocities and the vast store of information that was lost with that).
Using the cloud for office apps is basically not necessary for what you are doing, since when you are writing a document for local use, or working on spreadsheet data, there is no technical need to use a cloud service to do this, and by doing so you endanger privacy and your control over the data.
Whats really going on here is an attempt for large corporations to nickle and dime you and monetize you, perhaps by the minute, to use their software, while if you use an open source desktop app, you have unlimited use of the software for as long as you need at no charge.
Secondly, open source is all about users being able to control, modify, run and expeiriment with the code they use, and being able to read it. Using apps on a server farm takes away the users control over the software they use, as it does with taking away users control over their data.
Avoid Software as a Service like the plague.
Or goes bankrupt?
Poof!!
You no longer have the application, or the data. Your 'competitive edge' is now random electrons heading for NGC6724.
My initial reaction is to say that computing is simply cyclical; what was once mainframes and dumb terminals turned into locally installed applications on desktops and laptops, and now we're doing that again with Teh Cloud (tm). However, here's the difference:
1.) In the 80's and early 90's, overall technical competence of computer users was higher. Yes, the there was always the secretary who tried to use WordPerfect to make a database because she knew exactly one program, but overall, especially if you had a home computer, you had some concept of what you were buying, and what the things on the spec sheet meant - computers being sold today will have helpfully descriptive bullet points like "great for multitasking" instead of "8GB RAM", something that wouldn't have passed muster in the last cycle. .doc and .jpg files that are more standards compliant, but many of the web apps that are popular aren't necessarily tied to the "open/change/save/close" paradigm that is commonplace in the desktop world.
1b.) Malware was much less a problem, back in the earlier days of computing. E-mail viruses were a thing, certainly, but for the most part, one ran a virus scanner and moved on with life. Also, with less hardware to throw at resident software, any kind of malware that ran resident would use enough system resources to alert the user to its presence, which is less the case now. Google Docs doesn't care about macro viruses, and users of that platform don't have to, either. There's value in that proposition for many less-technically-inclined users. Similarly, backups/hard disk crashes are "someone else's problem".
2.) In the 80's and 90's, systems were generally designed for interoperability a bit better than they are today. It's possible to send an e-mail from a server running Exchange 2016 Preview to an SMTP server from 1989 and it'll be able to meaningfully use the message. This is not the case with Facebook or WhatsApp.
3.) Inherently connected applications are the norm now. The utility of Facebook is "the rest of the stuff on Facebook". Google Docs and Pixlr don't apply to this point since they still deal with
4.) "Bleed little, bleed often" is a more culturally acceptable proposition for most people, as it gives them the instant gratification of getting the product at a price they can afford, while not requiring a gargantuan up-front cost that happens regularly as people feel the need to keep up with the Joneses. $5/month = $180 over the course of three years, which has basically been the shelf life of every version of MS Office released. Makes it a lot easier to swallow for many people, whether or not it's actually a value proposition in the long run.
4b.) The fact that virtually every software developer who has implemented IAPs instead of a one-time, up-front cost has made more money on that business model. At this point, it's solely a matter of principle that a developer of a paid application would sell a perpetual license, since general acceptance of subscription and IAP licensing makes it a better idea for everyone to go down that road instead. This was not nearly as true in the days of mainframe computing.
Now all of that being said, I do think that video editing is one of the few tasks that will never lend itself to a subscription model, beyond what Digital Juice does. Editing-as-a-service makes very little sense, since even a moderately sized project will still take tens of gigabytes of upload time, which means "hours before you can edit". Meanwhile, 100GB of assets is not unheard of for even a two hour wedding video shot in HD, and with upload speeds still measured the single-digit mbit/sec unit, it can easily be days before editing can even be entertained. At the same time, costs are a lot higher for a company looking to get into that business, because you're going to get much less ability to thin provision even 500GB of space, as the nature of what's being done is going to make much more use of that space than the OneDrive accounts with a 1TB progres
It is faster, gives the user more control, is more responsive, is more secure, etc.
It is generally better in most circumstances for anything serious.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Two years is our horizon for browser support. Two other trends that have helped us in this regard are (1) that most browsers auto-update or at least nag you a lot and (2) IT departments are more accepting of users running Chrome/Safari/Firefox alongside IE. We're targeting enterprise/internal users, not everyone on the Web, so we can also put some requirements in place when we deploy.
Most of our functionality uses standard HTML/CSS/DOM features, so our we haven't had any issues with features dropping. We don't rely on 3rd party extensions such as Flash or APIs/features that don't have broad support. The decision to use Canvas over SVG for complex visualizations is due to partly this - SVG support is spotty across browsers, Canvas is pretty stable now. Canvas is also much faster at rendering large data sets, which is the other reason for using it.
-Chris
Anywhere that latency is not adequately met by "cloud apps" will require desktop apps.
Over time, bandwidth will become less of an issue as it continues to improve but latency is governed by the speed of light and light ain't getting any faster.
Conversely, if a "cloud app" is a huge pile of JavaScript that does everything locally on your machine, it is arguable that it is really a desktop app.
If I need an application that has to crunch a million numbers into a few cells, I am more than likely going to want a browser application because that will get the impact of the computations off of my local CPU in a straightforward way.
If I want an application that is less computational, such as a calendar application, I don't want a whole bunch of generic controls such as a back button or an address bar, or having tine extra work of dealing with tabs to go from reading slashdot to working on my calendar for the week. I want to be able to click once on my OS task bar and have a window come up that is dedicated to my calendar. The browser experience is just shitty for light applications and I hope that the companies out there continue to develop native windows applications. I really don't get why people were so nuts over google mail. Maybe it was good but the browser experience killed it for me every time.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No. And the "trend" referred to here is 99.999999% junkware. Slow junkware. Junkware that typically invades privacy and/or bombards with ads. You can't compete with my image editor. You can't compete with my word processor. You can't even compete with my text editor. You can't compete with my SDR software. You can't compete with my database. You can't compete with my media center. You can't compete with my fish tank controller. You can't guarantee that you, your ISP, my ISP, the connection(s) between them, the name servers, the competition for bandwidth at any one (or more points) will work to my satisfaction. Or at all. You can't even promise the app will BE there (cough, Google, cough) when I need it. Or that it will work properly in my chosen browser. And you're almost *certain* to screw it up so badly that it does all manner of things with rollovers, popping up garbage ads and menus without an instantiating click or drag or keypress from me.
And the other .000001% ??? Minimalist web-apps that never, ever hold a candle to a real app running on your own hardware.
Seriously, even the *speculation* is ridiculous.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.