I have to break up with my browser... but I swear I want to stay friends.
Oh sure, I'll keep Firefox's number handy for those brain-dead moments when I just want to review the Evolution of Dance or check the latest nerdy tech news at Slashdot.
But that's it. No more serious business applications in a browser. It's over.
I admire those solemn developer-soldiers who toil trying to build browser-based business applications. Their job is impossible and it's not their fault. My expectations are probably too high.
Consider the browser's poor marks on the following fronts:
- Spell Check (if available, implemented in a herky jerky kind of way)
- Keyboard Shortcuts (try pressing Ctrl+S for save some time)
- Performance (I'm tired of postbacks)
- Security Restrictions (more yellow bars prompting me to trust)
- Reporting Tools (uh... was that important?)
- Browser Compatibility
As a business community, we've come to accept these limitations as satisfactory trade-offs. Perhaps it was originally to avoid the disruption of installing an actual application on each desktop. Perhaps it was during the giddy dot-com carnival where everything was going to be done in a browser.
Considering that knowledge workers' continued productivity increases are key in most industries, why do we tend to tend shackle our best producers with sub-standard tools at the desktop?
Now, a quick side-trip for the inevitable AJAX discussion. Google Docs, for example, has done things previously thought impossible by using AJAX. Kudos! In my experience, this can be a fragile development environment and just isn't my first choice. I'm not convinced that this is the future of Internet-based applications.
As for me, I'll bounce back. I have a date with ClickOnce.

Peter Lucas, Decade's lead technical writer, recently announced an update to the EnvisionConnect Style Guide.
Significant change must be significantly better (chapter 2)
When I train 

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