Sniptools

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.

This post is tagged Musings