Proclaimed Dead, Web Is Showing New Life
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Of course reports are greatly exaggerated. For something like 'the web is dead', which is essentially punditry, reports will naturally trend towards being premature as the incentives for publishing are biased towards publishing early.
You don't get page views on opinion pieces if they aren't controversial. Things are rarely controversial unless they're exaggerated.
The more interesting question is not if the web browser will eventually diminish in importance, but rather if the web will eventually be eclipsed by custom fat clients.
Or they can both coexists without one eclipsing the other. :)
Yak yak yak yak yak look at me look at me
If anything, nobody likes dealing with the logistics of pushing client-side updates to users, especially with Web-based apps that to deal with multiple versions of REST/SOAP APIs (most hated is graceful degradation for older apps). My App Store icon already shows that 8 apps need updating. Goodness.
So I think the Web is safe. Because then you only need to update the browser, from the user perspective to take advantage of most functionality updates.