I was subjected to using Launchpad this weekend on my netbook. It was relatively terrible, because the netbook has such a small viewing area, and Launchpad really has the "desktop" in mind. Google Reader is also relatively terrible on a netbook. I ended up writing a really dirty Greasemonkey script to hide all the unnecessary crap above the content in Reader so I could actually just focus on the feeds.
It got me thinking about app development in Android and iSlave. Android devices, for instance, have many different screen sizes (and with the iPad coming out, so will Apple's devices). They solve the different screen size issue quite elegantly. In fact, for the most part, you don't have to deal with pixels and positioning. Of course, this also increases complication in some places, but generally only requires some limited XML knowledge.
So I brought this up at my coworking space yesterday with other designers, developers, and non-technical people. After whiteboard scribbling and discussion, I came to a single conclusion: CSS was the wrong solution for page layout.
Web applications are becoming the de facto applications for many people. I think I'm a minority now because I still use a desktop mail client. My feed reader is a web app though, as are most of organizational tools. Native application developers are quickly moving into the webapp space only to find that the problems they already had grand solutions for on the "desktop" have generally been hacked around or ignored in the webapp world.
I'm not sure if I have a proposed solution that can be dealt with in the short term. There's a lot of momentum behind HTML 5, and I think some designer somewhere will put a bounty on my head if I suggest taking away the layout functionality of CSS. Maybe we just need a toolkit that'll remove the absolute heinousness of css layouts by providing a layer of abstraction. Javascript would probably have to play a part in this story, but I'm pretty convinced that those who browse the web without javascript would probably be happier on a BBS anyway.
Suggestions? Comments? Ideas? I'm sure that with the collective smartness of web developers, we can solve the problem of different browser viewports and create fluid layouts for web applications. Anyone wanna volunteer and make it? I promise to "test" it. :)