breakable
After trying to hit Safari's Back button but instead closing all the windows, a crazy theory occured to me: The rise in instant messaging is fueled by as much by fragility of webmail (and web applications in general) as it is by the other improvements over email (specifically, presence.)
Specifically, the younger crowd that is most drawn to IM is exactly the one least likely to have Outlook or a regular mail server and thus using Hotmail or Yahoo! mail. Since web applications aren't first-class desktop citizens they therefore are missing several interfaces that normal applications have: you cannot Alt-Tab to them, you cannot launch them separately, they don't "install" and stick around on your desktop, and notably, they cannot control what happens when you close them. Indeed, you'll notice that instant messaging applications from every provider forgo even the usual window decorations and are very hard to quit indeed. Another example which attempts to reverse this trend is Pyro, an appification of the group-chat webapp Campfire. And Firefox will initially balk at being closed when it has more than one tab open.
I think before long we'll see a generic way to dress up web applications much like normal desktop apps but still retain much of their own power; I just hope it's sooner rather than later.
Comments
What makes web applications the most annoying for me is that they're tied to all the other browsing crap and they live and die with it. If I have, say, Pandora running with its little window playing music and I'm reading a webpage for work, and then I say "Okay! Done with this now!" and quit, then suddenly the music stops. Oh, right, my music was in the browser. Annoying. And I go back to my regular music player.
If the browser was somehow always running, like a daemon process, and the browser windows were just little threads, that would be better. Currently the browsers leak and bloat and have to be killed so often that there's no point.
- conrad
yeah, the fragility of webmail is important. lots of my friends hardly ever check their email because they forget about it. it's not staring them in the face like aim is. plus immediacy, etc.
- britta
For all the talk of WPF/Avalon and MCE, I think one of M$'s biggest planned long-term selling points with Vista is solving precisely this problem you identify (with MSN/Windows Live services being first among equals, of course).
- Jonathan
Hey Josh...
I will take some time for this one. Fragility of webmail, hmmm. Blaming a browser like IE, sure. However, op systems still support conventional apps and are not built exclusively to support a browser environment (as much as MS may want to claim). Until then, there will be brittleness...
Webmail apps break, oh well, but are still useful. There are some with drag-and-drop, calendaring and other useful features. IM is also useful, but I find it just a bit less intrusive than my cellphone. Call me old-fashioned, but I do have work to do...
- RobH
Hey Joshua, have you checked out http://www.3d3r.com/bubbles/ ?
- Adam
Wasn't the point of Campfire to bring IRC to non-technical folk ? If you have to install and configure an application, couldn't you just use an IRC client ?
- Graham King
Graham -- That is true, but it becomes very annoying for heavy users to use it within a browser tab...
- joshua