~ryanlowe/blog: The Internet is Surfing

The Internet is Surfing

Scoble points to a post on Frans Bouma's blog.

I don't buy IE going away completely. Even if "webapplications" start looking like native windows apps, you still need something to "surf" with -- roam aimlessly and discover new things. People will always want to do that.

Web browsers (and HTML) are the glue that binds all of the Net's different protocols together. You can click on an news:// link to get your news, a mailto: link to email (and on and on) all from a browser. When you take surfing and linking away the Internet seems limited and the protocols more separated. So you'll need navigation glue to tie these webapplications together too.

Some might say "we can use a search engine to find what we want -- we don't need to surf". But you are limiting yourself to whatever the search engine gives you -- do you really want to give the search engines that much power? We need to be able to establish our community of links with web pages.

The text web will live on, despite webapplications. In fact I have a feeling that web pages will probably be cleaner when developers can use familiar widgets instead of squeezing UI in HTML that was never meant to be there. The line between webapplications and web pages will be clearer -- which is good.

My prediction of IE7 goes something like this:

regular web browsing
full standards support
.NET-like GUI (a la VS.NET, which may or may not actually be written in .NET, doesn't matter)
support for MS extensions to DHTML/ASP.NET to support the bridge between traditional ASP web applications and native .NET Windows apps
explicit support for .NET winform apps

When I first read about .NET last year one of the things that caught my eye was the "sandbox" idea for downloaded winform apps. When you download and run a .NET application from your web browser (I believe IE6 supported this) the browser set up a security sandbox for the application, saying what it could and couldn't do. Why haven't more vendors released these kinds of downloadable apps? Is it because they don't want to have to get people to download the .NET framework?

Posted at May 27, 2003 at 02:38 PM EST
Last updated May 27, 2003 at 02:38 PM EST

Comments

don't forget tabbed browsing.

» Posted by: roy at May 27, 2003 08:01 PM

I'd be very surprised if Microsoft did tabbed browsing, actually. They sort of have tabs in Windows XP when like windows merge together on the toolbar.

Tabbed browsing seems easy to us, but to beginners it could be confusing. I know my Dad hasn't exactly embraced tabbed browsing even though I've tried to explain the differences. No tabs just keeps things simpler ... and Microsoft IE usability tests have no doubt proven that already.

» Posted by: Ryan at May 27, 2003 11:43 PM

Never thought about that. In that case, they should include that feature, but have it turned off by default. I think that would satisfy both MS and the consumers.

You would just go into Tools->Internet Options->Advanced Tab and then check on Tabbed Browsing.

» Posted by: roy at May 28, 2003 12:11 AM

I still wouldn't use IE if it had every feature Mozilla had. Open source software has a certain feeling of personal security to it, like the code has been audited by a thousand eyes, each one ready to pounce on any hole for invasion of privacy or spyware. Geeks are known for their fanatacism about these things ... check out Slashdot under "Your Rights Online" to get a taste.

As long as IE is closed-source, Microsoft will never compete in my mind because I don't know what the heck is going on under the UI. Of course, not too many people think like me/geeks ... so they are out of the woods. :)

» Posted by: Ryan at May 28, 2003 12:26 AM