Comments on: The web browser as a coccyx, HTML as an appendix http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2005/08/19/the-web-browser-as-a-coccyx-html-as-an-appendix/ An industry analyst blog looking at software ecosystems and convergence Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:35:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Anthony Cowley http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2005/08/19/the-web-browser-as-a-coccyx-html-as-an-appendix/comment-page-1/#comment-501 Anthony Cowley Sat, 20 Aug 2005 03:24:22 +0000 http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/wp/?p=322#comment-501 It's an interesting issue that clearly hasn't been resolved yet. I see at least two key issues that weigh on either side of the debate: 1. Having a UI experience tailored to the activity can be nice. That is, an interface for interacting with a dictionary isn't the best one for interacting with a weather report. 2. Having separate applications for every single thing I want to do on my computer leads to a bad experience. This is due not only to HCI issues (lack of consistency), but also to the very mundane issues of application startup time, application switching time, and memory usage. As evidence of both of these trends, I think we have great examples with OS X Dashboard and Konfabulator widgets. The initial experience is often very positive: You have an attractive, functional UI tailored for a particular purpose. The extended experience is sometimes more negative, as you realize that there aren't that many widgets that are all that useful... and do you really want 20 different widgets always running? They use a lot of memory, and tend to not be very well organized. Ultimately, all of the web-based information delivered by widgets is available via a Browser, and the deciding issue, for me at least, is that I always have a browser window open. Given that, it is simply more efficient for me to use my Browser to consume online content. There is no extra startup time for a custom app, and there is only the memory overhead of a new Firefox tab as opposed to another entire application. Ultimately, I think the current dominance of the Browser is due to it being a more responsive platform for consuming data over the network than any other option. You can either view the future as the browser becoming the desktop, because it offers a more responsive, integrated internet experience, or you can say the desktop will become the browser. The latter would be defined by rich client apps being integrated into the desktop as tabs are into firefox. It’s an interesting issue that clearly hasn’t been resolved yet. I see at least two key issues that weigh on either side of the debate:

1. Having a UI experience tailored to the activity can be nice. That is, an interface for interacting with a dictionary isn’t the best one for interacting with a weather report.

2. Having separate applications for every single thing I want to do on my computer leads to a bad experience. This is due not only to HCI issues (lack of consistency), but also to the very mundane issues of application startup time, application switching time, and memory usage.

As evidence of both of these trends, I think we have great examples with OS X Dashboard and Konfabulator widgets. The initial experience is often very positive: You have an attractive, functional UI tailored for a particular purpose. The extended experience is sometimes more negative, as you realize that there aren’t that many widgets that are all that useful… and do you really want 20 different widgets always running? They use a lot of memory, and tend to not be very well organized. Ultimately, all of the web-based information delivered by widgets is available via a Browser, and the deciding issue, for me at least, is that I always have a browser window open. Given that, it is simply more efficient for me to use my Browser to consume online content. There is no extra startup time for a custom app, and there is only the memory overhead of a new Firefox tab as opposed to another entire application.

Ultimately, I think the current dominance of the Browser is due to it being a more responsive platform for consuming data over the network than any other option. You can either view the future as the browser becoming the desktop, because it offers a more responsive, integrated internet experience, or you can say the desktop will become the browser. The latter would be defined by rich client apps being integrated into the desktop as tabs are into firefox.

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