Browsers vs. Application Environments and how that may affect privacy

I don't know if this blog is still being read or not, but here is my culminating post which results from a conversation I was having tonight...

Browers are obviously in a transitional phase between "browsers" and "application environments". Web-enabled applications (like email clients and so on) despite their more responsive interfaces seem to me to be declining in favor of the sheer convenience of web applications running in the browser. I'm one of the only undergrads I know who still uses an email client for my personal email, but even I am starting to use my gmail in a browser.

Another shift is the relevance of privacy. Many of these new applications rely on detailed usage data for functionality and monetization.

Web browsers are not designed to be application environments, and as such their responsiveness, usability, and power suffer, while development remains difficult.
It seems likely that one day web browsers will be more explicitly designed as application environments, although the questions of what will change will be extraordinarily difficult ones. Many of the benefits of current web applications could disappear if the application shift were poorly managed... total portability, no need to install, isolated in a "sandbox" from the computer, and more.

However, assuming that these problems were solved satisfactorily, having a more powerful system to build web applications could present an interesting compromise for privacy. Facebook's newsfeed relies intensely on both explicit and implicit behavioral data (as well as explicit preference settings, but those are less interesting) to filter the gargantuan feed into something manageable. Since most data is explicitly opted in to facebook - contact information, photos, etc. - this "underhanded" information gathering presents somewhat more of a privacy concern, especially concerns that this information will not be used only for usability but monetization. In a more powerful application environment however, this behavioral data could be collected and stored clientside, and the feed could be filtered on the client side as well. All facebook would need to do would be to push the continually updating algorithms and data-collection rules to the client.

Defining the walls between client and server would be tricky of course... Facebook could say they store that data on the client, but in a powerful application environment, it would surely have the ability to siphon off that data if it ever wanted to be sneaky. Practically speaking, this idea may be impossible to implement, but it's an interesting idea.

More generally... I can't wait until browsers get more app-friendly. I'm tired of my old-ish computer stalling for a second after I open the umpteenth google map and it loads all of that heavy javascript.