Maybe It's Time to Rethink the Browser
Posted on Thu, Jul 07, 2011
In a series of recent posts on this blog, we discussed the notion of browser versus apps. With the browser you have access to the entire web and all that entails. With an app, you have an elegant container that does one thing very well, but the problem may be comparing the browser, a 1990s notion with the modern mobile app.
Perhaps it's time we changed the browser to work better in today's mobile-social world.And that's just what RockMelt, a browser that just received $30 million in funding from Andreessen-Horowitz is attempting to do. In fact, in a blog post on the funding, Ben Horowitz explained why in his view, the browser still matters. Horowitz walks us through a nice history of the browser, which his partner Mark Andreessen helped invent.As Horowitz points out, other than adding tabs, the browser is not very different from what it was in the 90s and that's astonishing when you consider the changes on the Internet since then. Of course, to be fair, there probably have been some other innovations, but his point is well taken.Back then, you needed to be a professional web developer to put content on the web. Today, just about anyone can share content, whether that's your pictures, your thoughts on the next presidential election or a YouTube video. Today's tools make it much easier for people to add content to the Web and they are doing it in large numbers.RockMelt is trying to take all of that into consideration by making what it believes is a better browser with all of the social elements built right into the interface. But whether you think RockMelt is the answer to this problem, it's clear the browser needs some fresh paint and updating to take into account the way people use the Web today.One thing the browser absolutely has to do in my view is travel with you. I'm not sure why Chrome doesn't do this, for instance. Just as when I open my other Google applications, I get all of my content wherever I am, no matter what device I'm using, it should work the same way with my browser, yet it doesn't. Why hasn't the browser joined the Cloud?Apps are self-contained, and the best ones are extensions of the general web service. If you open Twitter on the iPhone, you will see all of your direct messages and @ replies you would see on the web (and perhaps it's even easier to track on the iPhone). But as we've discussed here, at worst, apps are walled gardens locking us in and take away all of the advantages of the open web.What we need is a browser that operates like the best apps, that incorporates mobile and social elements in an integrated fashion, that lets us access our information wherever we go, and that gives developers the ability to take advantage of this functionality.It's time to free the browser from the desktop and let it link to the cloud and give users access to their browser information wherever we go, just as we can with so many other applications that were once tied to a single computer.
Photo by Johan Larsson on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.
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