Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I work at a software company that primarily develops web
based apps.  Our core product is a personal organizer app that manages your
contacts, email, calendar, blah blah blah, all the same stuff that thousands of
applications already do. I believe ours is different because although it is
deployed over the internet, there are virtually zero postbacks to the
server.  Once you login, we make HEAVY use of dhtml and XMLHttpRequests to
send and receive data from the server.  One of the coolest things about the
app is that the users state is preserved just as well as Outlook or any other
desktop app. 

I bring all this up because Jon
Udell posted about the need for a better, more powerful
browser in order to successfully deploy more complex
applications over the internet.  I think in an academic sense he is
correct, I think that there ought to be a kind of web services browser, the kind
that Adam
Bosworth has talked about on many occasions.  I
also agree that maintaining state information is of utmost importance, as this
is a primary difference between a windows app and a web app.

We maintain support in our app for Firefox as well as IE,
and the only change that I wish for in the realm of browsers, is for Microsoft
to release a new version of IE with an improved Javascript engine.  When we
test our app, the performance and responsiveness of Firefox far outpaces
Internet Explorer in every aspect; the xml requests return faster, the initial
page loads faster, and it renders the dynamic markup faster.  Kudos
to Ben
Goodger and his team of developers.  So while I
think there will be a need for different, perhaps better,  browsers in the
future, I believe we can still make progress with our current
architecture.