I just stumbled upon this great topic on Ajaxian.com.
The cause should be evident to everyone. We’ve taken what was first called LiveScript — a crufty embedding just good enough to validate a form or two — and we’ve abused it into being the foundation for a whole new kind of application platform. The browsers have just not kept up and the situation will only get worse with the accelerated proliferation of Web 2.0 apps.
Okay, he’s using the big buzz word, “Web 2.0″, but the point is pretty clear. We “discovered” (at least that’s what I like to call) Ajax and evloved into the new web era where web applications are no longer just web applications. Web applications, or the web experiences, have been heavily improved with Ajax coming into play. The result? Hybrid. It’s still the good’ol web content that we know about, but with the secret sauce of Ajax, we achieve great user interface interactions where we no longer break a simple request+response with a page refresh. Sounds cool right? But aren’t we moving too fast? The article puts out a great example:
Now I fear history may be repeating itself. Yesterday, I had Firefox 2 for linux crash 5 times, and IE7 for XP crash 7 times. The cause? Too many fat Ajax applications. Zimbra, the whole Google bestiary of applications, Yahoo Mail, etc.. These are all long running applications that I keep open for most of the day. Then all of a sudden the Browser is gone and I have to relaunch and login all over again.
“That ain’t a great example, it’s pretty common now days” you might say. And yes, that’s exactly why this example is great. Remember back in the days when Ajax hadn’t been heavily implemented? The web and your browsers worked almost perfectly and happily. Many of us have been blinded with all the cool new UIs Ajax has brought onto the table (or web page to be exact).
Ultimately, one of the most important piece for the web today is the in fact the browser itself. Without the browser, Ajax won’t even be here, with crappy browsers, Ajax application will never truely shine. Clearly, the applications have made far ahead of the browsers where it requires far more powerful support from the browsers. It’s like running World of Warcraft on a Pentiumn III computer with 128MB of ram (i highly recommend you don’t run that). Now there is one distinct difference between a desktop application running on an old machine and running a heavy Ajax application on the latest version of the browser. The truth is our machine doesn’t suck and if the Ajax application was written as a desktop application, I gurantee you it would run just fine. If you just happen to run into a browser crash, before you restart your machine, do a process list check and see what’s crashing it. Most of the time you will see your favorite browser hogging up almost 100% of your CPU (even you have a core 2 duo) and a crap load of memory. Think about it, how much memory can a freaking web application really use? Or let me rephrase that, how much resource *should* a freaking web application really use by the definition of the browser?
TIME TO CATCH UP, BROWSERS! YOU ARE NOW THE TURTLE, AND THE APPLICATION IS THE RABBIT!
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