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Has the browser become more important than the OS?

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zridling:
Because of the cloud and Web 2.0 apps, most of my day is spent in a browser, and much of what I do is in a browser. The underlying operating system is increasingly irrelevant, which aided my switch last year to GNU/Linux without any real problems. I contend this is also why so many don't feel the urgency to upgrade from XP to Vista yet — everything still works fine in XP.



Is the browser becoming more important than the OS?

f0dder:
Is the browser becoming more important than the OS?
--- End quote ---
For some people, perhaps.

But, unlike all those web2.0 (and web3.0 and WHATEVER) people that are so full of themselves like to think, not everything is suitable for running in a browser. Games, stuff that requires immediate feedback, compute-intensive stuff (of the not-so-easy-to-parallelize type), et cetera.

And while you can run office-style things from a browser just fine, I'm not sure I want to - I don't want to be unable to access my stuff / edit my documents if I lose my internet connection for whatever reason.

Oh, and even on a fast low-latency line with AJAX apps, there's still more latency than when running native apps. There's probably a lot of people who aren't bothered by this, but I am.

allen:
My internet connection  is  painfully  unreliable,  and as such I
don't really allow  myself  to  become  absolutely  dependent  on
anything  that  I  cannot  access offline.  Even gmail--my entire
account is backed  up  locally  so  I  can  access e-mail when my
Internet connection is down or slow.

Furthermore, I cannot tell  you  how  many  times  I've  lost  an
e-mail,  forum post or other document because I was editing it in
a web form.  Whether it's  failure  to  submit due to Internet or
server issues and inability to go back (suck as with some  secure
forms  or  forms  where JavaScript rather than the actual editbox
holds the  text).  Subsequently,  even  for  web  based  things I
typically do all of my writing in an  offline  application.  This
very post is being composed in  my  text editor, to be copied and
pasted over at submission time.

Additionally, of all the applications on my system, it's my  text
editor(s)  that  must  be  proven  the most reliable.  I crash my
browser from time to time--but my text editor must keep going.

If I am composing anything requiring any sort of significant time
or thought  investment,  I  want  the  fewest  possible points of
failure.  With web apps, you have the potential for  the  browser
to  fail; the potential for your local isp to fail; the potential
for the remote host  to  fail;  the  potential  for the script to
fail; the potential for your session to expire.  There  are  just
far  too  many  things  that  can go wrong -- compared to working
offline where there are only  two  points of failure at any given
time: The operating system and the application in question.

So for me, the desktop is still home.  I love putting  things  on
remote hosts knowing that no matter  where I am I can access them
so long as I have access to the Internet--but the  web  is  still
very  much a secondary environment for me.  So long as it's still
a system of unreliable  layers  of technologies scrapped together
and stacked on top of one  another  where any one of them hiccups
and all is lost,  I  won't  be  adopting  the Internet apps as my
primary work point.

iphigenie:
Although I make my living in web development, I still mostly use desktop apps.

I buy online, I research online, but I tend to do things on the desktop

Most of the web apps are just not as responsive - I especially notice when doing things like search or edit. I have just been looking for a bookmark manager and having tried the online ones it was just sooo slow to manage bookmarks, move them around or edit their properties to add tags.

So I only use online tools where I want to store online for backup or sharing, or where it is just for fun. Eg: librarything, bookmooch, smugmug, diigo (&spurl for the "i saw at work and want to check later at home" things). I think these are the only ones I use atm, and I have accounts with tons and tons of places since I have a professional interest

There's also the issue of trust, which I don't have to many of these providers - they could disappear overnight (the way the economy is going, quite a few will go bust this year), their security could be not as good etc. etc.

But it is the "no way I am ever organising my --whatever-- online if it takes so long to do one!" feeling

One thing I might do online is write -so i can start in one place and continue from elsewhere etc. - but when I try to really write I do not do it in a word processor (the formatting gets in the way) I tend to do it in an outliner/notetaker text tool - and although there are snippets/note takers online, they are not aimed at someone capturing bits for writing - they dont expect your notes to all be related in that way- so moving, merging etc are just too slow. That "edit" slowness I mentioned earlier

Back to the desktop for that.

zridling:
f0dder, I agree that there is this big problem with online-only versions. Some have tried to overcome it with local versions that sync with online versions of the same programs, such as Zoho's calendar, word processor, etc. But right now, those only come in Windows versions, which are no help to me. And as Allen notes, what's the point of a quad-core processor if your computer is only as fast as your internet connection?!

By funneling so many new apps through the browser, you seem to be using it for things it was never setup to do, much like using a car when you really need a pickup truck.

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