web--!

First of all, let me explain the strange title. If you are familiar with C-like programming languages, you may already have guessed its meaning. It's a plea to diverge from the path the web is currently taking.

Seemingly the browser has become the new platform. The extensive use of Javascript faces browsers with challenges they were never designed to meet. None of the components currently used for Web 2.0 applications were designed to be used the way they are. The Web was designed for displaying more or less static pages (which the server may dynamically produce). This results in technical problems and major overheads. Tricks are used to enable stateful communication over the HTTP protocol or dynamic interaction with the web page. Granted, these tricks work most of the time – neglecting the overhead they create for the time being. Still apparently many AJAX-requests seem to be lost in the nirvana of the internet, never to be found again. If you have never seen a half-loaded AJAX-page where the content – which seems to be acquired by AJAX-requests after the page has loaded – is missing, you can count yourself lucky.

Making web applications compatible with browsers poorly implementing the standards takes a lot of the developers time away which could be used in a better way. Even creating static pages which look exactly the same in all browsers (I am looking at you, Internet Explorer) is a lot of work, fiddling about trivialites such as assigning the page a maximum width (no, CSS max-size is not the answer as it is ignored by Internet Explorer). I cannot even imagine how painful it must be to make a page compatible to mobile-phone browsers (maybe that is why most sites offer a seperate mobile version to which you are automatically taken when connecting with a mobile-phone client).

But another important issue which I cannot stress enough is that Web 2.0 applications enable their developers to intesively amass your data and/or data about you. Traditionally, you either uploaded things intended for the public to the internet or stored private data (i.e. backups) at trusted places. Nowadays, pretty much everything is uploaded to anyone who offers the particular service. Whatever you produce using a Web 2.0 application is out of your reach. It may be kept even if you delete it on the front end; it may be gone some day; it may become public, either by mistake or on purpose. You have no influence on what happens with it. You do not even have the security that the application even will resemble its current state in the future; you may find yourself with data in a web-application you must learn to use (again).

The best solution would be to end the browser's unhoped-for streak of popularity and replace it with a technology that it designed for doing what the browser is abused to do – running dynamical programs including complex user interaction. If most applications ran on a single virtual machine, it would have the potential to supersede the browser of the common platform. Good riddance. Java's WebStart is a good attempt of streamlining the deployment process of applications.