One of the things I have been thinking about these last few years is that we are trying to make browsers do things that they were clearly not designed to do. The introduction of statefulness is an implicit yearning for thick, but connected, clients. The rise of Flex/Silverlight, of iTunes and Flock (holy cow, Fidelity round), of the Atlas Venture and Sequoia-backed Songbird (XUL app) shows that the future may actually belong to hybrid clients.
I am not sure I buy this line of argument yet. However, it’s clearly quite a trend - here’s the argument why web apps are over-rated in brief.
