Not terribly sure about Chrome OS. It's maybe too
minimalistic, especially with the popularity of apps
on new platforms.
IMO some people are simply too obsessed with "the
internet's gonna be everywhere" to be realistic about
it.
It's not just about the internet. It's about the UI.
People don't want to be typing in URLs all of the
time. People don't want browser controls all of the
time. People don't want to wait for slow pages to
load. People don't want stuff to stop when a
connection is interrupted. People don't want to trust
a third party with their data.
People want a set of icons they can click to go
places. People want stuff that just works, even in the
face of connection issues. People want fast, snappy
applications.
Performance in web apps is a mixed bag. Sure, the
database can be theoretically faster, but the UI is
generally a lot slower.
It has to be streamed over a connection that's a lot
slower than PCIE.
It has to be interpreted by the browser - in several
languages.
Any JavaScript has to be interpreted (slow overall) or
compiled (longer page loading time during the
compile).
If it's interrupted during download, it has to wait
for the connection to reset.
Until IE9 or the next version of Firefox come out,
it's being drawn in software. In the meantime, modern
OSes are hardware accelerating the UI of their apps.
It's not really that good with multiple core CPUs.
Frankly - web apps are just plain slow. They have
their appeal, but it's just the case that native apps
can be written far closer to the processor for much
better performance.
In addition,native apps can take advantage of all of
the hardware on the platform (sensors, web cams,
scanners, printers, multiple displays, card readers,
headsets, etc). There's really no standards at all for
web apps utilizing all of the hardware on various
platforms.
So, while a 100% web OS has some appeal to a lot of
people, it's just not the case that web apps can do
everything that native apps can do, and they really
can't get the same performance as native apps. I think
there's still gonna be a demand for local apps for
many years to come.
Discussion on:
Message 8 of 1
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