Ajax and future of applications

I'm not confident Ajax will have a big future. We all know Ajax has been there for 4 to 5 years ago from the technological point of view. I participeted in the development of a Ajax type of application a couple of years ago and we had to deal with some issues:

1. JavaScript is a pain when you write cross browser code - we decided to code only for IE
2. JavaScript in IE is slow, very slow if you try do perform complex operations on the client. Back then the computers weren't so powerfull so performance was not so spectacular
3. JavaScript in IE crashes the browser from time to time.
4. JavaScript is difficult to write clean code and debug problems
5. Ajax style pages are not compatible with the "back/forward" button of the browser which people are so used to.
6. IE is not a platform for desktop-based applications, it was not designed for that and will not be changed in the near future.
7. Ajax based application have much more network calls than normal ones. See here 

I am not so confident that enterprise application could be based on the Ajax technology as a framework. For sure there will be some gadgets which will mke life easyer but only locally, not as a general concept.

Let's take a look at Yahoo beta, a wonderfull UI, close to what desktop Outlook has, but difficult to work with. It sees slower than the original one, the scrolling in the message list is very difficult, if you have hundread of messages and slow connection then there's no chance.

HTML is good at representing information, pages, links but building a serious UI only with HTML has for now I think is not a good solution. HTML is not for UI, it is for presentation.

Mozilla XUL, XAML or other markup languages are more close to what a UI should look like, but there is no standard for these ones so we'll wait some time before we can use one as a general purpose UI language.

Ajax is cool for now, but the need for a standard UI language is still open.