Desktop Inside a Browser On a Desktop…???

As TechCrunch says (and I’m paraphrasing slightly here), huh?

AjaxWindows is a very slick implementation that gives users comfortable and understandable access to stuff (apps, documents, services, etc.) on the Web. But isn’t that kind of why we have things called browsers? While I must admire and even pay homage to Ajax developers good enough to reproduce the bulk of the Windows experience in a browser, I’m left wondering why they bothered. Other than the challenge, that is.

In fact, AjaxWindows might actually add confusion to the user experience rather than helping to erase it, as I suspect the product’s inventors hoped. Sometimes, the stuff you want to do opens your own browser, not exactly within the AjaxWindows view, but sort of on top of it. If you try to close the browser — in which AjaxWindows is now running even if you can’t see it — you’re liable to trigger a dialog box asking you to confirm you want to leave the AjaxWindows world even if all you really wanted to do was get back to it.

I suspect one could create a highly usable browser-based experience for a user who wants to organize Web-based application activity and storage locations without resorting to attempting to reproduce everything — including all that’s bad — about the Windows desktop user experience in the process.

All that said, there is one aspect of this whole space (which has a couple of other interesting players in Desktoptwo and eyeOS and the forthcoming Cloudo) that may turn out to be the thing that makes them successful. If Joe Chivas (the upscale version of Joe Sixpack) finds the desktop look and feel more comforting than a bare-bones browser with some usable graphics and links, then one of these apps or a successor might well become crucial to the widespread adoption of the ZPC.