The latest trend in Web Applications is – surprise, surprise! – going back on to the desktop. e Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are two technologies that help Web Apps behave more .. hm, surprise, surprise! … desktop-like. Full circle? Why the “move to the cloud” circus if we’re coming back to the desktop anyway?
And I am glad. I never liked this “put everything in the browser” movement, I always felt the browser being too constraining.
At my current company we develop software with a browser based UI, and it is a pain to make it in such a way, that the poor operator won’t scream after a week.
Browsers are for browsing, but when you have to enter data fast and easily and navigate, and go back and forth between different pages it is uncomfortable – not to mention that the whole browser-server communication can be awfully slow, which can annoy a user a lot.
After two years working on systems which are used 8 hours a day by operators, I am fairly confident that browsers are not good for this kind of use.
So I am glad there are some new initiatives coming up, which may replace the browser as the sole web user interface in the future. Because we need some usable ones.
Ok, I have to confess that my background as a Delphi developer makes me a bit biased. No, I don’t want to go back to the desktop world, but I have certain expectations about a usable UI.
Like, tab pages, tables with rows, and sub rows, dynamically configurable columns, etc.
Adobe Air is a good start, but I think it will get better. At the moment though, I am happy that something started, new alternatives to the browser.
[...] don’t know, I’ve never been the fan of the put everything in the browser and “fly me to the clouds” movement, for several reasons. First, in my opinion the web browser is called browser and not [...]