We've seen the last of the great desktop apps. The end of one of computing's longest eras.
"Which email program should I get? Which browser? Which messaging app? What about a music player? I hate iTunes."
These questions used to be interesting, and I used to enjoy answering them. Finding and customizing desktop clients, be they feature-rich MP3 players like Winamp or Foobar or only-the-nerds-know gems like Trillian or Miranda for instant messages, or Infranview for images, FoxIt reader for PDFs and even little utilities like Caffeine, an app for keeping your Mac from going to sleep, was a full-on pastime.
To be a tech enthusiast used to be to know about these things — to have and share a set of software tools that made your computer work better than everyone else's. It was like being part of a club, and the benefits were real. You knew things that others didn't.
But last week, when a friend asked for an alternative to Apple's Mail app, I had a hard time answering. This should have been an easy question, and as recently as last year it was. But Sparrow, the app I would have recommended, is no longer in serious development (it's makers were acqui-hired by Google). Thunderbird, the mail client from the guys who make Firefox, has been put out to pasture. Outlook is part of Microsoft's bloated and increasingly irrelevant office suite.
There are a few other apps in the line of succession for Sparrow's crown, but I found it hard — as did a few other tech-savvy friends — to explain why most people would really be better off for switching. Mail.app — the once-unthinkable default option. The best advice I could give was to use Gmail's web interface.
2012 has been a rough year for desktop clients. The promise of mobile, a brand new multi-billion-dollar app industry where consumers actually pay for apps and new millionaires are minted on a regular basis, has drawn scores of developers away from the hairy, disorganized world of traditional desktop apps and software licensing. The Mac App Store and the Windows Store (in Windows 8) are burgeoning not with a vibrant selection of alternatives to core OS apps but with small utilities, games, and single-purpose apps. They're stocked like mobile app stores, not collections of traditional desktop apps.
Gmail, Facebook, Twitter have been beckoning their users back to web interfaces or mobile apps, and we have obliged. That mobile apps and web apps are the future has been taken as conventional wisdom since 2009 if not earlier; only now, however, is this shift wreaking the havoc it promised.
Chrome, an app so closely tied to the cloud that it crashed for users last time there was a Gmaill outage, is well on its way to becoming the most popular browser, largely because it's good at making itself invisible. Firefox, the browser that became popular mostly just by adding tab support before the once-dominant (and insecure) Internet Explorer and allowing for power-user extensions, is on the wane for the first time in its history. Internet Explorer is finally decent enough that its users don't realize they're using it.
In fact, there is no strong case for or against any of the major browsers anymore. They all serve the same web apps ably, securely, and without getting in the way. Power users, to the extent that they still exist use Chrome or even Apple's barebones Safari.
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