Goodbye Browsers: What Next? How technical design for web apps is chaging. | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye Browsers: What Next? How technical design for web apps is chaging.

joelhughes.co.uk

9 pointsrudenoise14 comments

The web may be breaking free from the browser. So what does this mean to developers and how will this effect the web development process (and my first Erlang Web App)?

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  > And, if concepts like Ubiquity take hold the
  > web may break free of the browser entirely.

Grammar aside, since when does Mozilla Ubiquity intend to break free from the browser??

I wish I could vote this post down.

Fair point, but Ubiquity does change the way the browser works to the point that it becomes something else entirely: a tool for mashing up content (rather than viewing it pre-packaged).

An Erlang 'app' that interfaces with a CouchDB to create a real-time web API?! I think this blog just won buzzword bingo!

I'm so hot right now!

Although he actually calls his article 'Goodbye Browsers', I think he actually means 'Goodbye websites as islands of data'. He talks about data coming from different sources over the web, and getting consumed by applications which may not know where the data is coming from. There's nothing in that which precludes the browser, as commenters here and on his site have noted.

In fact, that's the premise of Web Services, mashups, and Facebook applications, most of which involve the browser...

Au contraire, given the current trend (HTML5, Google Chrome and V8...) I would say that the browsers will become omnipresents, if it's not already true !

The browser is the simplest interface for presenting and connecting disparate applications and information.

No, it won't go away in the next hundred years.

Actually it's far from simple. Do you find the back button easy to use ?

And, speaking of applications, I don't think that the webapp is a better methaphor than the desktop app.

What about desktop as browser or browser as desktop? What if you had something like a desktop with icons on it. You double-click on the icon, and it starts the webapp, which just appears in its own window. The webapp can be cached on the local machine, with a check for new versions on startup. You can "bookmark" web apps while normally browsing the web by hitting "Save Shortcut to App". After that, you don't have to open the web browser any more. The shortcut authenticates you and brings up a toolbar-less non-browsing "browser" window to run the app.

Then it wouldn't be the browser as we know it. The browsers are misused because originally they were a document viewing system.

What's so sacred about the browser as we know it? People want to use web apps. Why not make it convenient for them?

I'm not sure that people want/use as much web apps as you think. Most of the web is still "documents", and if you want an browser adapted for webapps, then use prism (http://prism.mozilla.com/)

Let me put it this way: does it make that much of a difference to the user if an app is a web-app or local? I think they're only aware of it insofar as sometimes they can't do what they want because the network is down. That, and they know that sometimes they can get at the same data from any networked computer.

Prism is exactly what I had in mind!

I think that the main problem of webapps at the moment is that webapps are like islands : generally you can't get your data out of the webapp, you can't take the data of a webapp to put it into another one.

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