I highly disagree. Native apps can provide way more better integration to your desktop and therefore improve the user experience. E.g. showing a consistent (growl) popup for tweets is not possible as far as i know from the web version. And that's just a very simplified example.
It's a good step forward. The web standards and especially their implementation in browsers and on websites are unlikely to catch up operating system and application development. Therefore the native app is likely to be able to provide something that the browser can't. However, with such notification APIs and other technologies coming, they might be good enough.
I still like how I can switch between applications way more than I like switching between different sites or rather the tabs of one site. Any improvement on that area?
There are a few legitimate things I need Growl to notify me about, mostly unit tests. Unfortunately, every single time I install any other Mac application that wants to use Growl to notify me about dumb shit, I have to go configure it not to use Growl for dumb shit. It's an annoyance.
I don't. That was, in fact, my original point: did you see the comment I was originally replying to? tommi explicitly named Growl notifications of new tweets as an important feature of desktop Twitter clients as opposed to just using the website. I, on the other hand, find Growl notifications to be an anti-feature more often than not, and disable them for all kinds of things (IM clients, Firefox, etc.) I actually do want to use.
So your point is that people who voluntarily it tend to have a less favorable opinion? That is not exactly surprising. Not to say your priorities aren't right for you, but I don't see the larger point here beyond "I prefer different things!"
As I said at the outset, it's an off-topic rant about how Growl by default enables every application that wants to annoy me, to annoy me. It's a two-line, two-point HN comment, not my magnum opus. The "larger point" is pretty banal: I want to use Growl for some things, but I don't want Growl to, by default, spam me with every possible notification it can, while providing no easy way to change this default so I continue to be surprised by innocuous-seeming applications that I install. (If you're ever designing software that does something similar, think about whether you have users like me and how to accomodate them. That's as large as the point gets.)
