A two for one today. Just a lot of things to get off my chest.
Recently I got into a discussion with a former boss about task specific browsers. This thought was no doubt spurned by our recent experience with Xul-runner and this article on TechCrunch. Needless to say, we both felt like we had missed the boat on that idea.
However, the conversation did lead me to think about how much time I spend in browsers. In fact, short of writing java code and changing the song on my music player, almost all of my interactions with the computer come from the browser.
This post is being put together on the browser. I work on web-apps, so I spend a good amount of the day testing my code in a browser. Google is becoming like air, I can’t function without it. I’ve even moved away from my email thick client to a web-based one.
All of this makes me very interested in Browser Wars 2.0. Browser Wars 1.0 was kind of dull. There was Netscape, which was horrible and IE which was much better, but evil. Since evil always triumphs over good, because good is dumb, IE was the natural choice. This meant that the first iteration was really a competition to see who could be less bad.
This time it’s different. Most websites look and work well in most browsers. The question who is going to be able to create the browser that is the most pleasant to use. So far, I think Opera is winning and IE has no hope. But I could be wrong. Plus, there are the new breed like flock which are tying into this whole Web 2.0 thing. I’m holding out hope that the end result of it all will be a better browser, which is a really good thing since I spend so much time in one.
