[LINK] The App is Dead (OK Not Really, But The Browser Is Back)

[Fernando Cassia]

On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 8:34 PM, jim birch <planetjim at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the-app-is-dead-ok-not-really-but-the-browser-is-back.php

The problem is twofold:

1. Web apps work alright as long as you have connectivity all the time
2. Consumer lose the ability to keep running an older release (just
look at the GMail fiasco over the last UI changes).
3. The temptation of app providers will be to build "walled gardens".
Ie "Chrome App Store", and extending APIs to certain browsers.
4. Ironically, the "thin client" approach of using browsers for apps
was OK and made sense ten years ago, when you had 64MB ram on clients,
and sub-200 Mhz CPUs. Today, client machines have GIGABYTES of RAM
(heck, Nokia's N9 is a cell phone and has a gig of ram), and dual core
CPUs... which makes the average machine more than apt to run
traditional Client-server computing... yet, the fad is to act as if
the client system has little cpu and ram to spare.

Give me a fat app anytime. Cloud computing and web based apps are "the
fine art of separating people from their software"

I prefer client-side apps anytime, thanks very much. If only from a
consumer rights angle. People will realize this sooner or later.

FC