After Mozilla’s success in the launch of Firefox 3 and Microsoft’s beta release of IE 8 it may seem that the web is all about the browser. But recent developments show very intriguing futures for the software that has become central to our lives. I see at least three different directions, all of them dissolving the concept of web browser as we know it today:
Data comes to me
Since I started using Google Reader some years ago, I browse the web less and less. Surfing is old fashioned, I’m rather sit comfortably at the porch and let RSS feeds, podcasts and mashed up data come to me. I get what I want, when I want, and only go fishing for more following suggestions from my trusted sources. Yes, Google’s search engine is also there to guide me to the unknown, but that’s anymore my main web activity. Ubiquity, one of the recent experiments at Mozilla Labs, takes this philosophy to the next step, letting users create their own mashups, combine web services wherever you are (webpage, email), to avoid what you need to do now: linking to them, browsing to them.
Apps are the browser
I couldn’t help getting an iPhone 3G. To me, its main contribution to the world is not that it makes surfing the web on a portable device doable for the first time. That’s cool, but there’s something bigger: Most iPhone apps are connected to the web and let you do tasks transparently, without the need of a browser. So, you tap on the Facebook app and do Facebook activities without having to browse to the website in Safari. May seem a small change, but when online access is (almost) everywhere (and more and more people have it) this means that browsing is not relevant anymore, the Internet becomes just a tool to perform tasks that are more powerful connected than disconnected. Mozilla Labs is also developing the concept of generating desktop apps out of websites, in the Prism project.
The browser becomes the OS
This is the most natural step if the other two mature enough. If the web is there, always, and we have intelligent apps that bring to us what we need when we need it, why do we need the OS anymore? We can have all our data online, we can have all our apps online… and load them whenever we need them. The interface then can become much more flexible and playful, touch screens (even Microsoft is working on this!) and natural language (as Ubiquity aims for) be the way to get what you want. The OS will still be there, of course, but it will be an interface manager more than anything else. Mozilla Labs have created Aurora, a prototype of a browser where the browser is “transparent”.
[Update, 16:11] I guess when I started writing this morning with the buzz about Google Chrome in the back of my mind… But did not actually mention the newcomer! Reviews previous to the release of the G-browser argue that it aims to kill Windows by letting (web) apps live a new life inside the browser. Here you have a condensed version of the comic book that Google has used to introduce the browser (it will be available for Windows later today). Reading through the comic it seems promising but just one more step towards the future of the Internet. I have come to learn that change is always slower than we expect.
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