Back to the desktop — in the name of the browser!

Nik Cubrilovic of TechCrunch published a nice article about the rich internet application concepts that pop up on the web. Here are some of the approaches:

• Adobe: Flash/Flex/Air
• Microsoft: Silverlight/IE8
• Mozilla: XUL
• Yahoo: YUI/BrowserPlus
• Google: Gears
• Apple: Webkit

One crucial part of making a wep app a „mature application“ allowing web apps to store information locally. This will allow to make applications more „data rich“ and „file aware“ than web apps today often are. It can also open up ways to work with web applications offline!

Interestingly, there are specifications in the works for that that many big players in the field already endorse! Most vendors followed the concepts issued by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (see latest draft of the WHATWG HTML5 Spec).

Status/future support for the Spec