Looking beyond the web browser

Browsers may soon be pass´ and we will instead have Inter­net data gath­er­ing done through desk­top appli­ca­tions where web­sites work only as data providers, and all cal­cu­la­tions + pro­cess­ing are done locally on user's machines for fast response times. And no, I don't speak only of Macro­me­dia Flash's future

"Click. Back. Click. Back. Click. Back, back, back, back. Click. The tyranny of the Web browser is a fact of life. The only rea­son we put up with its inef­fi­cien­cies is that most of us don't know of any other way to access the Net-based infor­ma­tion we so des­per­ately crave." [B2.com]

Browser wars have been a favorite pas­time of many tech observers, and have been a source of reg­u­lar dough for sev­eral web devel­op­ers given the whole rig­ma­role in mak­ing a web­site look "browser inde­pen­dent". Now with Netscape scrapped and Mozilla hav­ing forked into a num­ber of builds and avatars, it is time to think ahead. Macro­me­dia Flash may be get­ting dressed for desk­top appli­ca­tions itself, but there are others.

The prob­lem with reg­u­lar browsers is that for the most part, they can present us with only one thought — one page — at a time. (We can, of course, open up more than one browser win­dow, but the clut­ter quickly becomes unwieldy.) So we plod from one page to the next, and then back to the page we looked at five min­utes ago, until we lose our place and have to go back to Google to start all over again.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Find­ing what we need online can be less tax­ing and less time-consuming. As Web inter­face expert Jakob Nielsen pre­dicts, "The Web browser will have a smaller role in the total Inter­net expe­ri­ence." Instead, Inter­net data gath­er­ing will be sucked into every­day desk­top applications.

You can already see hints of this in spe­cial­ized appli­ca­tions like weather and stock track­ers that you can down­load onto your desk­top, or so-called RSS (rich site sum­mary) aggre­ga­tors (Net­NewsWire for e.g.) that go out and get head­lines from all your favorite news web­sites and blogs and then col­lect them in one handy place. In the Apple world, an appli­ca­tion called Sher­lock trolls the Web for local movie times, phone num­bers, and flight infor­ma­tion, and it even lets you track eBay auc­tions — all using the same con­sis­tent inter­face. It really cuts down on the need to hop around to 12 dif­fer­ent sites just to get some basic infor­ma­tion. The iTunes Music Store is another good exam­ple. Win­dows based soft­ware such as Coper­ni­cus has been doing this for a while now too. It is a sep­a­rate appli­ca­tion on your desk­top that you launch just like any other, except that it is con­nected to the Inter­net. The soft­ware — which is half music search engine, half e-commerce ser­vice — is cus­tomized to let you browse music offer­ings, lis­ten to clips, and buy songs. If it weren't for the two-second delay as your com­puter accesses each clip, you wouldn't even know you were on the Internet.

These appli­ca­tions are all cus­tomized to do one or two things, but they do them much faster and bet­ter than a browser does. Of course, there are advan­tages to the sim­plic­ity of a browser. The Web would never have taken off with­out its stan­dard way of retriev­ing and dis­play­ing infor­ma­tion. But now new stan­dards such as XML are free­ing that infor­ma­tion from the way it has tra­di­tion­ally been pre­sented. Now any appli­ca­tion can grab and manip­u­late the data. "The more we can take func­tion­al­ity out of the Web browser and put it into appli­ca­tions, we will be bet­ter off," Nielsen says. In future ver­sions of Word or Excel, click­ing on a hyper­link won't cause a Web browser to open; the appro­pri­ate data will sim­ply be imported into the appli­ca­tion itself. Of course, you will still be able to open a Web browser if you want to. But why would you? Web­sites will be impor­tant for the infor­ma­tion and con­tent they pro­duce, not for the way they look. Peo­ple will have to resort to open­ing a Web browser only if the soft­ware they are using is not designed properly.

There is another rea­son that Web brows­ing will become less nec­es­sary. As band­width and com­put­ing power increase, our desk­tops will become mini servers in their own right. When we think about the impact and promise of broad­band, it is usu­ally in terms of get­ting better-quality music and movies to the desk­top, and get­ting them there faster. But a big­ger ben­e­fit may lie in the abil­ity to down­load more raw data to your PC, which will then be able to crunch and sift the data for you. It will also be able to dole out appro­pri­ate bits to other com­put­ing devices in your home — your PDA, your cell phone, or your dig­i­tal enter­tain­ment center.

The prob­lem with surf­ing the Web today is that any web­site you visit won't know where else you've just been. When you do a search on Google, it also doesn't know where you've come from or what you've been work­ing on all day. (And you wouldn't want to give out that sort of infor­ma­tion any­way.) But your com­puter knows where you've been, what you've been typ­ing, and some­times even what music you've been lis­ten­ing to. If your com­puter were down­load­ing mas­sive search results and other data from the Web, and com­bin­ing those with what it knows about you, then it could min­i­mize the "infor­ma­tion pol­lu­tion," as Nielsen calls it, that you have to wade through. "The para­dox is that the com­puter needs to get more infor­ma­tion, for you to get less," Nielsen says. In other words, as our PCs get ever more pow­er­ful, we will be able to down­load larger chunks of data. And with that data being processed on our machines, instead of on a Web server, we'll have eas­ier access to exactly the infor­ma­tion we need.

Still, don't expect the Web browser to dis­ap­pear overnight. Users have spent a pretty long time get­ting used to web ori­ented nav­i­ga­tion, that's not going to fly out the win­dow any­time soon.