Gilad Bracha 1, Tim Bray 0

I definitely have to side with Gilad Bracha on this one...

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/05/19/Continuations-and-GUIs

Gilad argues that we need something richer than the current web GUI and that AJAX is a step along the way to better web apps. This point is difficult to argue, but Tim Bray tries. Tim Bray argues that the contraints on web UIs are a good thing. He implies that when web UIs came along, users jumped for joy because of the simpler user interfaces.

Maybe business users who hated their jobs were happy because they no longer had to spend more than 10 minutes learning a user interface. They had been time warped back 10 years into the days of mainframe terminal applications. Oh - but they were much happier now because instead of just a text interface, they could now use their mouse to click on a submit button that was full of colors and gradients and the screen could have lots of pretty fonts. Users happy to use a browser instead of a desktop app have a hard time learning new user interfaces because they don't want to - they are not highly motivated. Users who are using their computers in the pursuit of something they are passionate about have never had much of a problem learning Windows or X11 applications.

Tim Bray goes on to say that once you know the browser, you are a long way to being able to use most web apps. That's true, but most web apps are extremely simple. Even the most complex AJAXy web applications like Yahoo Mail have few or no configuration options. They are much simpler than their desktop counterparts and much less customizable.

If it weren't for being able to access my email from any web connection, I would certainly use a desktop email application instead of using Yahoo email. Are any business users using web based spreadsheets instead of Microsoft Excel? There are probably not many yet - but thanks to AJAX and technologies just being invented now, some day they might.