Thursday, July 30, 2009
A world without the browser
This morning I was contemplating the browser war, which has started again. IE vs. Firefox vs. Chrome vs. Safari. Nice fight to watch, something that takes me back to memory lane when Mosaic was my browser, when the fight was Netscape vs. Microsoft. You know, the browser is the center of our Internet experience. Everything goes around the browser. Google is built around the browser. Microsoft and Yahoo just agreed on a search deal around the browser. The browser is everything.Then I got an epiphany.
The browser is going to disappear.
Whhhaaaaat? Are you crazy?
Ok, ok. Let me try to explain ;-) I saw the birth of the browser. I attended the third World Wide Web conference. I started the first web company in Italy. Once Tim Berners-Lee came up with the hypertext concept and created the idea of the web, I even thought about building a browser. I did. I still have some Tcl/Tk code somewhere. Others were much better and faster... The browser was the perfect visualizer for the web on a desktop. The hypertext meant links. Links need to be clicked. We had the mouse. We had big screens. We had a chair and a desk. Great match. Boom, the Internet was born.
Then came mobile.
I haven't seen one single implementation of a browser on a mobile device that actually makes the experience good (not great). Do not tell me you like the iPhone browser. It is horrible. It is probably the best you can do on a small screen, with no mouse. Clicking is a pain. Zooming and panning is a super-pain. You click when you want to scroll. You yell.
If you can choose between browsing on your PC or on your iPhone, what would you choose?
Exactly.
Now let's talk about Mobile Apps. They are built for interaction without a mouse. With one finger (the other hand holding the device). They are quick, immediate, intuitive, interactive.
If I have to choose between checking the weather on my PC or on my iPhone, what do I choose? The iPhone. One click. Done. I do not have to sit, open the browser, click and re-click and maybe even type my zip code. It is there when I need it.
Think about it. Mobile Apps can deliver a better experience then those on PC. Granted, I am excluding the productivity tools where you need a lot of typing. But those are few and you will need a keyboard, a desk and a chair. When you do not have to do a lot of typing, a mobile app becomes preferable.
Where is the world going? To mobile. The new Apple Tablet will blur the line even more. But it will be a mobile device for sure. An e-book reader + video player + music player + weather viewer + news viewer.... All with your fingers. All with little apps. All with no mouse. All with an App Store where you can find everything you need. The world is all going to mobile. We will spend more time without the mouse than with it.
This is the Internet era all over again. Back then, we had hundreds of small companies that started with the goal to build web sites. Now, every company wants an iPhone app. You can deliver more value with an app, than you can with a web site. More interactive, more personal, 24/7, in the hands of your customer, with push capabilities.
The result is that every company will have a mobile app, and hundreds of small companies will be created to support it. That you will "navigate" between companies moving from an app to another. That the search engine will not be on a browser, but in the app store (or in the search engine of the app stores, which someone should start developing fast...).
This is going to change the world as we know it. If the browser loses its centrality, ads will go somewhere else. The search engine will be way different. Someone has to invent a platform to link apps one to the other, of course, but the infrastructure is there. It is the engine of the browser itself, with its HTML, AJAX, CSS.
The browser will be swallowed inside the apps. We will have a world without the browser. The future is all of a sudden clear to me. Well, the browser fight looks kind of moot now...
Posted by Fabrizio at 18:24
13 Comments:
Antoine said...
I really like that many folks are asking this question. I think, especially with the mobile browser aspect of things, that this needs to be asked and asked again. Sure, the browser has a place, but on mobile, maybe not so much so.
I too wrote on this - however it was some months ago - and you've covered a few things that I did not. Here's my piece, written at Brighthand.
Comment Posted at 20:03
Antoine said...
Apologies on that, the correct link in that last comment was:
http://www.brighthand.com/default.asp?newsID=15178&editorial=Mobile+Web+Browser
Comment Posted at 20:05
Alessio said...
I think the browsing experience with iPhone and Safari is quite good, surely it has a small screen but I didn't suffer all the problems you mentioned.
Anyway, good to know that you already bet on the Applet tablet :P
Also, everything an app? Mmmm I guess Google won't agree....
Well, if I understood your point, you mean that the browser is still there, under the hood. Embedded in an app and with richer features.
That vision seems concrete to me, btw I do believe it's all about the interface: if you optimize the website to be navigated by a handhelded device the user won't complain or even distinguish between the browser and an app.
We're definitely moving to the cloud and the "always on"... and the browser will be the new core engine.
Comment Posted at 01:04
Gabriele Barni said...
Very interesting point of view, I agree too, yet the most mobile apps, in particulary the one that work only in online mode, for me are very inefficient, for example : Repubblica.app, Wapedia.app, Linkedin.app, Facebook.app, WSJ.app, Wordpress.app, WSJ.app, ecc ecc....
Look at Repubblica they have a very nice Website optimized for iphone that work very good, but I ask myself: what is the point to create a real application on the App Store ? maybe visibility ? ok nothing else...
I prefer use Safari and navigate on the really cool webapps designed for iphone, instead open a real application ( + memory consuming, + dashboard disorder, + battery consuming, ecc..) and have the same features and data that i can simply check on my mobile Safari with the url bookmarked.
I understand the use of Twitterific or Tweetie because Twitter mobile web-app is something very ugly, but if they a day develop a good web-app i can safely deprecate my Tweetie. It is the case of Facebook where the app is less usefull then the web-app for iphone.
I appreciate very Flickr, that instead of building an application for the appstore has concentrated his power in developing a web-app very navigable for iphone.
I think that the future will be more nice if: [[every company will have a mobile "WEB"-app, ... That you will navigate between companies moving from a "WEB"-app to another.]] And the search engine can be a Google WEB-app too , with a amazing new web-apps crawlers. :p..
Last thing.. I do not know how the companies will be happy to maintain the same app in 5 or 6 different versions for the different types of mobileOS. Maybe just only Funanbol is so skilled to have this type of capacity. :p
Comment Posted at 07:23
jackr said...
Well, I'm sure you're right that history will repeat. When browsers became popular, the hype machines clearly saw the end of all desktop applications ... but I look over my mechanic's shoulder and I still see some (darned archaic-looking) desktop UIs! When laptops became more affordable, everyone predicted the death of the desk-top ... but I still see a lot of boxes under desks, in Mom&Pops as well as software shops.
Perhaps it would be better to talk about rebalancing, shifting some of the work and value from where it's always been to this new place. For-purpose apps definitely can provide a better hand-held experience, in (as you mention) better gesture selection, and also the shuffling of the compute load between client and server (what made AJAX famous). But there would need to be a single, standard mobile UI kit, or pretty close to it, before most apps will chose mobile exclusively. A web app is just so much easier to build, and delivers so many more users.
Comment Posted at 09:44
GL said...
Insightful article, even if I wouldn't define horrible the browsing experience on the iPhone. It is the better solution we have seen so far on mobile devices, it never bothered me at all clicking or zooming and most of the time when I need to read news I prefer to switch on the "standard view" instead of using the tiny/remodeled version for the iPhone.
IMHO the point is that we can expect to see appealing applications replacing common browsing only where websites will be offering to developers APIs by giving them the freedom to build embedded micro-browser solution to run in stand alone application on mobile devices. This is the case of very popular applications for the iPhone such as Twitterfon Facebook, Flickr Search.
Companies/Websites which will understand the value of implementing an open framework and will provide APIs to interact with their services will lead the browsing experience revolution.
Thank you for the article,
GL.
Comment Posted at 11:13
andrea said...
Really inspiring scenario...
Widespread availability of Apps will move the bar up:
from Hypertext-based web to Apps-based web!
Looks exciting!
Now I need a "Wordpress-like" environment to quickly build self made apps!
Comment Posted at 01:05
stormy said...
Thanks!
This is what I've been trying to say for a while and you've articulated it much more clearly with "the browser is going to disappear."
I've been going at it from the "we need more web interaction for desktop applications". Your way of stating it makes much more sense.
Comment Posted at 08:02
There is no browser, because the mobile device itself is THE browser....
Comment Posted at 01:40
Andrea Trasatti said...
Uuuu, how I disagree on what you just wrote! :)
I thought it would be the other way around, apps would disappear (think of MS Office) in favour of browser-based apps (Google Docs). You are right, we are bound to live more and more of our life online and for this reason things in-the-cloud that I can open, read and edit from anywhere are going to be very interesting! For this reason the browser is going to be all over the place.
Yes, the engine might be embedded in other apps (I use NetNewsWire, an RSS feed reader that uses webKit to render HTML content for example), but the majority of things will be in-browser.
Also, all the apps you talked about like news and weather will be widgets or single-site-browsers like Fluid.
So I guess I almost agree with you, but from a completely different perspective, it's not that the browser disappears, it actually pervades everything.
Comment Posted at 04:29
Tom said...
iPhone-hype talk IMNSHO.
Just because the iPhone can't multitask properly and the browsing experience still lacks apps won't take over the web.
At what point is having only apps going to totally suck? 30, 40, 100? Websites are so much more flexible and easier to maintain.
Comment Posted at 09:58
1Settanta said...
(IMHO)Openness is browsing, not apps nor widgets.
There's no good browsing experience yet for several reasons you cannot blame browsers for.
Inventing the "mobile mouse" (working effectively) could take you leading the game
- why not? :-)
Comment Posted at 09:03
David Semeria said...
Yes, at the *moment* the mobile browser experience is not good, but it will improve. The browser will win on mobile for the same reason it won on the PC - ubiquity.
The browser is really just a glorified VM with a (semi) consistent UI rendering engine. It's not the perfect platform, but it is good enough - and combined with its ubiquity - this will be sufficient to guarantee its long-term domination.
BTW, I believe the real reason so many apps have appeared for the iPhone is because it offers a chance for developers to get paid.
