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I often hear people praising web applications (as opposed to desktop apps) for their portability. Indeed, making a desktop application available on multiple operating systems is difficult. However, I'd think web-applications have to deal with portability issues equally well, only between browsers instead of operating systems. Or is it not difficult to make a cross-browser web application?
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A web application is an application stored at a remote server. It requires a web browser to run and the internet for data or resource transfer. Whereas, a desktop application is an application designed to serve standalone machines that don't require the internet for its operation.
With web-based software, you don't have to install any software on your computer. You simply log into the program through your web browser. Typically, desktop software requires you to have a certain operating system and hardware capabilities. With web-based software, you don't have to stress about that.
Application portability is the ability of an application to be portably installed, deployed, accessed and managed - regardless of delivery model. The term defines an application's flexibility when used on multiple platforms or instantly accessed from the Internet, a desktop or network.
A desktop app runs on a stationary machine, or a laptop. On what we call "a computer". A mobile app is designed to run on mobile devices such as mobile phones or tablets - although they technically are computers as well- but have limitations when it comes to storage, connectivity, etc.
Browser compatibility is far far easily achievable compared to operating systems compatibility.
For detailed info on portability you can read this.
Software portability
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Of course you are right that there are cross browser compatibility issues with writing web applications. But, as with desktop application development, there are frameworks and libraries you can use that will deal with this for you (e.g. JQuery, Google Web Toolkit, Yahoo UI).
One thing that stands out as being simpler with web applications is having a consistent look and feel across platforms. Browsers all use CSS and generally have consistent looking form elements (or will use the appropriate elements for the platform). With desktop applications a cross platform native look and feel is more difficult to achieve. One of the big criticisms for using Java for cross platform GUIs is that even when you use the platform look and feel it is not native enough. I am not sure whether libraries like Qt are better in this regard.
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