"Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension."

(bursts into tears, runs out of room)

The state of memory leaks in firefox extensions is terrible even for trivial extensions... I can't imagine how bad it would be with something non trivial.

Well, "since we do most things on the web now" could also be translated as: "since we don't do much other than read emails, surf the web, do some IM/social stuff, and maybe exchange some documents".

Because sure as hell, 99.9% percent of us doesn't:

1) Write code on the web. 2) Edits images on the web. 3) Write documents on the web. 4) Maintains systems (admin work) on the web. 5) Produces/edits video on the web. 6) Produces/edits music on the web. 7) Watches movies on the web. 8) Does spreadsheets on the web. 9) Plays heavy 3D games on the web. 10) Does DTP on the web. 11) Does 3D modelling on the web.

Web stuff exists for all of these, but much much much fewer people use it than desktop apps.

Last time I checked, programmers use Emacs, Vim, Visual Studio, XCode etc. Those are not web apps.

It doesn't get much better for the general population, though.

Tons more people use something like Paintshop Pro and Photoshop Elements than something like Photoshop Express (the online flash photo-edit tool). And, Google Docs, which is much more realistic a substitute than some online "photo editing" app is, for it's market, is used by a tiny percentage last time I saw the numbers.

Maybe one day we'll do everything in the browser, but this is not that day, and limits in current web technologies (hell, even basic stuff like websockets are not universally available yet) and bandwidth will keep it that way for a while.

There are things that can be done nicely on the web, and things that would be frustrating and a huge throwback to the olden days of slow CPUs and pain. Text editing is one such thing. Everything that needs the handling of large volumes of data (or not that large, anything larger than, say, 10MB) doesn't work that well in the browser.

So, you, the one guy using Bespin for your programming work: good for you, but you are a tiny minority.