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Are Web Apps Better than Win32 Apps?

For years now, I have preferred using Windows rich client applications over web-based applications. The UI, responsiveness and total experience with a native Windows application has always been much better. More and more, however, I find myself preferring web applications. Why?

Surprisingly, I am finding that the speed of web-applications is simply faster than Windows applications, especially start-up time. For example, try launching MS Outlook and then launch Gmail. Which one is faster? Providing you have a broadband connection, my experience has been Gmail. This perception has trickled in slowly for me, but I realize that my first instinct when I want to quickly check my email is to reach for my browser.

Having your data available to you in the cloud is also compelling. Take, for example, Google Reader which is my RSS reader of choice. Having my feeds synchronized across any machine I use is a huge win for me. I no longer have to worry about synchronizing a Windows-based reader across multiple machines. It's all done automagically for me simply by being a browser-based application.

Of course, there are still many downsides to web applications. The UI's are not consistent or standardized enough for my liking. I'm technically saavy, so imagine the experience for someone who isn't. Also, the whole authentication mechanism is broken. I have numerous accounts and passwords spread across the different sites I use. I have to sign into each of these services far too often, even with the ability to keep myself signed in at some of these sites. I hope Windows CardSpace or one of the other mechanisms takes hold and makes the whole process much easier.

The holy grail, in my opinion, will be technology like Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's Apollo, enabling very rich, responsive UI's to give us all a more desktop like application, without the pain-point of installing an application.

Omar Shahine has an interesting post along this line of thinking regarding mapping applications. You can read it here. I couldn't agree more.

Tags Web 2.0 Silverlight Windows Desktop Apps

posted by John Walker @ 7/8/2007 10:33:00 PM

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Are Web Apps Better than Win32 Apps?

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