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Remember the days when upgrading your hardware meant a significant increase in speed when doing everyday tasks such as word processing and web browsing? These days, the speed and capacity of the hardware you buy makes little difference in these tasks and noticeable benefits are largely restricted to communities such as gamers, academic researchers, other scientific researchers, and perhaps users that make significant use of multimedia applications such as video and photo editing. With all of this computing power at our fingertips, why can’t we fully utilize it during common tasks such as browsing the web? Despite all of the web technologies out there that employ techniques such as dynamic page creation and server side processing, we are still stuck in the 1990’s paradigm of pulling largely static content from web servers and passively displaying them on our web browsers.

Perhaps this is the problem? Despite the recent overwhelming success of the Firefox web browser and my enthusiasm for it as well, web browsers as they stand today are still the limiting factor in the capabilities of web applications and their capacity to fully utilize system resources that are available on the client side. I recently came across an article posted on Slashdot that examines this problem at what people are trying to do about it. They refer to a programming model called Rich Internet Applications or RIA’s that strive to break the boundaries of current browsing methodology to create more interactive and user pleasing web applications:

What we need are applications that have the deployment characteristics of browser-based applications but have equivalent power and more interactivity than desktop applications. That’s what RIAs are all about. They bring complexity on two levels. First, computing happens on both the client and the server over a potentially unreliable WAN. Second, they aim to deliver highly interactive user experiences (UEs).

Google Maps (!) is one of the mentioned applications. Not only does it provide the basic functionality of other internet mapping services such as Mapquest, it also provides a user experience more like a desktop application and less like a web browsing experience of click and wait and refresh. It seems to me like this is the next wave of web applications on the horizon, the next “killer app” if you will. Perhaps even more crucial than the development of these applications, though, is the expansion of the browser’s capabilities to facilitate even greater funcationality.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 10th, 2005 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Opinion, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.