RockMelt For iPad
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
>> “Go back 25 years to the flashing DOS prompt. That wasn’t accessible to someone like me. What Windows and Mac did was make it computing accessible to wanna-be nerds like me. But today, h t t p colon slash slash is not natural. It seems like something ripe for disruption.”
What a pointless soundbite. No one real has typed h t t p colon slash slash in about 10 years. Google and others before it solved that problem long ago.
After Google decided to covertly introduce their own proprietary SPDY-protocol and to undermine standard HTTP, W3C and IETF "in the name of user-friendlessness" and Chrome started assuming that any non-canonical server-name (ie in a URL like "test-server/testapp/page") is a Google-search, I find myself manually prepending URLs like that with http:// all the time.
Granted. I'm not a normal user. It's not a normal internet use-case.
But browser-design as of late has made it increasingly needed to be specified. Someone, somewhere sat down and decided that this was a direction they wanted to go.
The URL-bar has always been a referentially transparent addressing-function. IMO making it not so is a very bad move, and it's sole purpose was to secretly promote yet another invasive Google-product into becoming a web-standard without involving anyone else for input.
Secondly, I like sifting through different sites (if they're built nicely), it adds variety - browsing is part of the experience of consuming content.
Also, there's an organisational overhead for setting up feeds. If you can just click on sites and explore, it's a different experience to adding feeds and refreshing. Consider it the comparison to doing your food shopping with a vague idea of what you want, and meticulously planning your groceries on-line and having it delivered. The latter is far more efficient, but the former is kinda fun in its own way and more entropic (which people enjoy in their lives).
I might be completely wrong, of course.