Is The Web Dead?
August 17th, 2010, 1:43pm by MikeI’ve had several conversations over the past couple of years with you guys that usually start with discussions of the iPhone versus other platforms (as most conversations between us do), and eventually move into whether the web as we know it is succumbing to the world of apps — which in some cases, are nothing more than site-specific microbrowsers. And then somehow we always get into the webOS/Android/iPhone discussion.
In Wired this month, Chris Anderson’s article “The Web Is Dead, Long Live the Internet” makes the case that, yes, apps are killing the open web. Most of what we do, particularly on mobile devices, is via (non-browser) apps. “For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible.” I agree. But I don’t think this is just the case for mobile apps — it’s at least as big a deal on desktop/laptop operating systems.
It’s clear to me that “apps” (both desktop/laptop OS and mobile) are replacing the browser more and more. Apps offer specialized capabilities that the Swiss army knife browser simply doesn’t, from a usage point of view. For example, I’m typing this post in a desktop blogging application (MarsEdit), when I could use the WordPress site on the Pyslent server. I even paid for the privilege of this Mac application. Among other things, what I got was integration with my desktop OS and file system, a much more flexible editing environment, and the ability to save files locally. So yes, I could have done this in a browser, but my user experience with an app is much better.
I also use applications (on my laptop) to integrate with Google Calendar (iCal and BusySync), SimpleNote (Notational Velocity), GMail (Mailplane), Google Reader (NetNewsWire), last.fm (iScrobbler) and Twitter (Tweetie), among many others. For that matter, I use Entourage for my work email, when Outlook Web Access would function perfectly well. In all these cases, I could use my browser, but I prefer features and/or the UI of the application to the web version. In fact, in each of the above cases, as far as I’m concerned, the web service is simply a cloud-based storage area that I access exclusively with apps, whether by phone or mobile device. The browser is what I use for Google searches — most of my web reading is actually done via RSS using dedicated RSS readers.
This makes me wonder how the Google’s Chrome OS is going to fare, where basically the browser is the OS. Seems like they’re zigging when the rest of the world is zagging.
What do you guys think? We’ll never get rid of a general-purpose browser, but do you think it’s less important now than it was?
August 18th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Apparently, a new feature of this blog app is that it sets the post time when you *start* writing the post, which was yesterday — so it appeared under Jake’s Encounter post that was actually posted many hours earlier! Wonder if anyone will ever see this one?
August 18th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Yeah, I wouldn’t have seen it until it showed up much delayed in Google Reader. That and the Twitter feed (via Firefox plug-in Echofon nee Twitterfox) for posts is often delayed, while comments show much quicker.
FWIW, I think the WordPress browser client does the same as far as date setting.
August 18th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
Wow, I was purplexed when I saw the Twitter update of a new comment on a thread I’d never seen. Anyway, for my part, I use the browser much more than any app. Outlook is probably the only desktop app I ever use for any sort of meaningful internet connectivity, other than Flickr uploaders or whatnot. I’ll ponder this more later.
August 19th, 2010 at 12:09 am
Plus, to the extent that I ever blog from a desktop computer, I use Windows Live Writer. Then there’s specialized programs like Skype and Instant Messenger. Besides that, I pretty much live in the browser. I don’t even use a local client for my personal email or calendar anymore, just the web apps on a variety of computers. The web interfaces are sophisticated enough nowadays.
August 19th, 2010 at 12:19 am
Obviously, on my Pre, it’s a different story, where I pretty much only use the browser by necessity, not by choice. Where possible, I use an app.
August 19th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
So the web certainly isn’t dead, it’s not even dying. Total web traffic continues to rise, and I bet even bandwidth agnostic metrics like hits or hours are headed up, even in developed countries.
More to the point many of the apps across platforms, but most evidently on webOS, are just specialized web browsers. They’re written in HTML, Javascript & CSS. I still spend far more time on the web than in apps when on the net. I actually switched back to Google Reader after trying some integrated desktop apps. There are certain advantages (caching content being a big one), but a well-written web page now does pretty well. I prefer desktop email clients, but browser based works fine, too. Yahoo mobile mail has lots of room for improvement, while GMail is better. However, I nearly always use the dedicated email client.
Besides that, the web has been dead since 1997 anyways, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html
August 19th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
The graph on wired is pretty telling– “web” now makes up for less than 25% of internet traffic, mostly due, it looks like, to the proliferation of video, which only increases the size of the pie. Isn’t video mostly on in the browser, though (flash-based sites like Youtube, CnetTV, Revision3 should all be in the web category, seems to me, even if it’s not technically port 80 or whatever).
Like I said, when I’m on a PC, I’m using a browser for the most part. But I’m noticeably using my PC less and less. When we can get facebook, twitter, netflix and Youtube on set-top boxes, and almost everything else on our smartphones, the need for a PC only seems to crop up for niche situations. Maybe Jake’s right, maybe all those are technically specialized embedded web browsers, but it does seem like a shift to me that most of my internet bandwidth flows into my Xbox, not my PC.