With Google, Microsoft and Mozilla betting on web, who has a doubt that web will win?
...oh... do you remember Steve Jobs was suggesting all apps for iPhone should be web apps? He was way ahead of his time.
Unfortunately, while they're doing this they're simultaneously changing the web into something which removes the very things which allow them to monetise it successfully today.
A web of WebGL based client apps which just ping servers for JSON objects of a custom nature will be even more impenetrable to massive data mining than the current JS infested mess out there, which was one of the many justifiable criticisms rightly thrown at Java applets back in the late 90s. The opportunity to rewrite the browser in itself and thus remove the HTML/CSS entirely will prove far too tempting.
I think WebGL is awesome. In combination with HTML5 audio and video, we can finally get rid of Flash and Silverlight and Java Applets or whatever crappy plugin that people have been using to distribute games and audio/video on the web. This is a good thing. The only reason for why we are seeing less and less usage of these plugins is because WebGL and the other parts of HTML5 are finally taking off, in combination with native mobile apps built on non-standard, often proprietary platforms. These proprietary platforms (e.g. iOS, Google's Play Services, etc...) are far more dangerous for the open web, than whatever ends up being standardized in W3C.
Those Chrome apps can and will be built mostly with HTML, CSS and Javascript. They will for the same reason that many people keep building HTML, CSS and Javascript today - for all the bitching and moaning about it, it's actually quite convenient and easy to build something functional and cross-platform and worry free, plus there's a huge knowledge base built around these technologies.
On rewriting the browser to have a small core and a UI built on top of web technologies, I think that will be awesome and from what I've been reading, Mozilla is already working on a next-gen Firefox that does it.
I'm far more worried about Dart VM or PNaCL, because in order to improve the web, Google is trying to replace Javascript with their own non-standard technologies, relying on their big market share to do that (sound familiar?). Which is why I'm happy that Mozilla exists to bring some balance with Asm.js and Firefox OS and the like. As proof, Mozilla forced Google's hand to include Asm.js in their optimization targets and that popular Unreal Engine demo works quite well right now in Chrome. So we still have healthy competition in the browser space and good things will come out of it.
Sure except Google is also pushing for it's own web techs, native-client and dart VM. Dont be too quick saying "the web won" when different vendors have different vision of what the "web" is.
A last thing, chrome apps API is not standard.
These days some of the apps I'm the most impressed with on iOS are really just webapps in a wrapper so that they can do push notifications (OWA for iPhone/iPad, for instance).
He only suggested that at the time because iOS had no app store. It was one of his cunning moments of misdirection and the sentiment didn't last.
As a developer of both apps and web applications, I still don't think web applications are anywhere near the user responsiveness, capability and ease of development of native. And the supposed advantages of write-once, run-on-all-platforms is a total red herring. The amount of work required to ensure a web application written for, say, iOS works as smoothly on Android has in my experience dwarved that of writing native apps for both platforms.
This could change in future, but at the moment it really feels a long way off.
Google and Mozilla is clearly betting on C/C++/GL and sockets. Chrome and Firefox is becoming another Qt.
Microsoft is hesitating because they're lingering on Windows/DX/.NET.
The main difference (beyond hardware acceleration) is how they cache data, and address latency. It is possible for both native apps, and web apps to get this wrong, and when they do it is bad for the user.
I am not sure why the user really cares if they are running a native app or a chrome based web app. What they want is a responsive interface.
As in...wrong?