Oct 24
My Next Browser Is An App
A non-trivial proportion of my life is online. My means of communication, information gathering and learning is on the internet. And a non-trivial proportion of the time i spend online is increasingly with my mobile phone. I use my phone to catch up on everything online during my increasingly extending commute to and from work. And lately i have begun to notice that a non-trivial amount of time that i spend on the internet is done with almost no help from the browser. I rarely, if ever, in the last few weeks, have started the browser on my phone.
Pardon the abused phrase, but there is an application for anything you might want to do on the internet and more often than not, the application is better than the ubiquitous browser. A mail client helps me read and send email - with a better editor, offline capability and a faster response time than the browser does. With the plethora of twitter applications, i can't remember the last time i actually visited the twitter website, let alone use my browser. My feed reader lets me catch up on all the blogs and the latest news. And it lets me sync this on to my phone and allows me to catch up with them even if i have a flaky connection. More specifically, my phone has fantastic applications for social networking such as the Facebook app and for news such as the NY Times and Time Magazine ones. The Wikipedia app on my phone lets me favorite articles and lets me search them quickly because of its caching abilities. And this is just the beginning. You can browse photos in a jiffy with the Flickr photo application, watch full screen videos with the YouTube app and even listen to internet radio with, well, a dozen different apps. Don't even get me started on how much better the maps application on the phone is as compared to the one in the browser. Frankly, i think my browser is the most underused function on my phone.
Applications specialized for the content they render have an edge over the browser. They know the content they are supposed to render and can optimize. So, the YouTube app on the phone is so much better at finding and rendering videos than the browser is. Even on the desktop, applications such as Miro and Boxee are much better for watching videos than your browser is. Take a look below: The first image is NY Times on the browser and the second one is from an app dedicated to NY Times. News is so much easier to discern with the dedicated app.
Dedicated applications also have other advantages. The biggest ones are offline caching and ad-free content. Look at the below image of viewing a video on YouTube on my phone. (Of course, i can just tap to hide the controls)
No spammy comments, no ridiculous advertisements, no 'featured' videos. Plainly and simply the video i want. Of course, you could have advertisements in the applications, but you always have the option of paying for the app and getting an ad-free version; an option that doesn't exist on most websites today.
I think that the ubiquitous browser is ill-suited for the future, ironically because almost all the content is moving online now. Which is also why i am specially skeptical about netbooks and about the browser being the operating system of the future. I believe the future is personalized applications for specialized purposes. The future doesn't have room for a generalist that does a mediocre job at everything.
No browser was used in the creation of this blog post.
