Nick Bradbury had a thought provoking post today on why users are moving toward a browser-based application structure and shunning installed applications. He posits that perhaps it is fear that drives them.
He says:
When you try to download something, you're presented with a security warning about how the software could potentially harm your computer. If you install the program despite this warning, your firewall often displays an intimidating dialog asking whether you really want to trust this application enough to let it talk to the outside world. It's a one-two punch that's driving away many would-be users of desktop software.
I am not going to say this is not the case, but I will make a second case that evolution to a browser based application structure is natural.
Initially we had programs on floppy discs or punch cards or cartridges. You could run one at a time. Then programs like Ashton Tate's Framework came out and let us have "integrated" applications that could share information between them.
Then the GUI desktop was developed at PARC, perfected at Apple and popularized at Microsoft. Suddenly we had Operating Systems which could allow us to run more than one program at a time.
So we moved from one at a time, to a few specific at a time and then to many at a time. And life was good.
Then we got slapped upside the head with the Internet. You see, even with the many-at-a-time, the limits of memory, the cost of software, and the limitations of technology kept us focused on one or two apps at a time and rarely with outside distractions.
Currently, I am writing this with 15 browser tabs active, Trillian, Skype, a mind map utility and Windows Live Writer all active. I am awash with distractions. It is hard to focus.
Increasingly, the browser tab-set is my focus. So those 15 things are often interacting. I have about 7 blog related tabs, two news related tabs, and six work related tabs. So, I have three sections of focus.
Running an outside application like Word takes me out of focus. The browser holds my community, my information sources, and my evolving situation.
So, running an outside application is much like visiting a specific blog. It is much easier to use an aggregator - even if that aggregator makes you jump off to the specific blog. The aggregator stays there, even after launching the specific blog. You never lose your focus.
And, yes, I know that there is no intrinsic difference between a tab bar in Firefox and the application bar at the bottom of a Windows or Mac screen. But this is a perception issue.
The medium is the message, one might say.
Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer
You are so right. Plus, the browser is the place in our minds where all of the other people are. So, it makes sense that applications are movign towards the browser.
I think that this is also possibly an unforseen by some people by product of the open sourcing of Netscape with the Mozilla and now Firefox projects. This really seems to have opened the floodgates for development. Largely because it lowered the barrier. It's hard to keep up with what people are developing for browsers these days. Not ot mention the emerging OverlayWeb http://www.communitywiki.org/en/WebAnnotation#OverlayWeb
We are exploding out multiverses of meta information, and the browser is definitely the medium that it is happening in.
It's interesting to observe that even the most novice computer user can usually use the browser interface. Even if they don't understand all of the functions of the browser. Even if they one of the peopel who don't understand that they can type "yahoo.com" in the URL line of the browser, and instead always type the sites they want to go to into a search engine, and then click on the link to the site they are looking for (there are thousands of people who do this). They still can use the browser. I have a theory that people who otherwise are quite computer illiterate are willing to learn to use the browser because of the pot of gold that it at the end of the rainbow of their learnign to use it (the internet).
Posted by: SamRose | 22 December 2006 at 08:51
No doubt!
My father read about Pandora on my blog the other day. He sent me an email asking questions about it, but before I could respond, he was on there and diving deep into the music.
With a desktop app, no way that would have happened.
Posted by: Jim Benson | 22 December 2006 at 19:07