2) Web hosted applications will be more reliable than anything you have at home, simply because it will be easy enough to use your home machine as a cache. The only good reasons to keep data off the net will sooner or later be transfer speeds (instant access) and privacy concerns. We're not there yet in this respect (witness the recent GAE outage) but we're moving in the right direction.
3) Constant internet connectivity is not 100% commonplace, but in a short while (less than a decade) an internet outage will have similar impact as a regular power outage.
4) On the contrary, web apps are almost always already more powerful than a desktop application. Webapps build on the power of the resources embodied in the web, those resources are vast, MUCH larger than anything you or I will ever have on our desktop.
> Webapps can never be as powerful as a desktop application
You're confusing technology with user interface. The primary difference between web apps and desktop apps in the future will be the idioms they use in their user interfaces.
Offline storage and various other HTML 5 APIs mean that there will be nothing a web app can do that a desktop app can't. Web apps might never be as efficient as a desktop app -- compiled versus interpreted languages being what they are -- but efficiency is much less of a concern these days. Web apps are often quicker to write, update and iterate upon, so for any given new application, the web version may have a structural advantage over the desktop app.
good point. But say you have a photoshop webapp (with all the features the desktop version has). When you want to apply several filters, you are depending on the capabilities of the server and also on the current stressload of the servers. Things might take a long time to complete or cost too much.
With a desktop app, you're in control of your own machine.
good point. But say you have a photoshop webapp (with all the features the desktop version has). When you want to apply several filters, you are depending on the capabilities of the server and also on the current stressload of the servers.
Why? You can push pixels with flash and JavaScript right in the browser. I'm not saying that doing it is right (neither is the article), but you can do it.
No with a Photoshop-like web app the server is simply sending javascript to your computer where it runs in your browser. There may be some interesting things like identifying the location of your picture that happen server-side, but things like filter will usually run client side.
* your account gets compromised, your password is saved in plaintext, etc...
* their servers are down, you want to work on a Word doc, edit an image. To bad, you can't because the app itself is down
* not everybody has constant internet connectivity.
* Webapps can never be as powerful as a desktop application.