Retiring the Browser

Shortly after I got into this internet thingy I started pontificating that the web was just a transitional phase in the progress of the net. I had no idea what its evolution would be, but I knew for certain that, just as the Model T and the Tiger Moth were NOT the acmes of land and air transport, the web could not possibly be the end point unless someone screwed up seriously.

So I do like it when someone like Dan Morril points to an Aussie piece on Practical web 2.0 documenting the road that leads us into the future while Retiring the Browser.

The time when Internet Explorer, Safari, Netscape, and Firebox (sic) as your window to the internet is just about done for. What is going to replace it? Rich internet applications that use components of your desktop and your browser make a more complex security model. The potential of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 is to bring richer content to you, to enable you to do things faster cheaper and better. Itnews.com.au is running a piece where they state:    

The browser might not hold its place long as the default Web interface, giving way to richer, hybrid desktop-Web apps, execs in one panel discussion said. Web browser technology won't disappear, and rich Internet applications like the Joost Internet video player are being developed on top of Mozilla's code.

The model of the internet is End to End. I am an end, you are an end, whatever happens in the middle exists only to facilitate communication and interaction between us. Browsers force us to "go" to a web "site" to get information or interact with people on "forums", a website is not an end, its an intermediary between me and the person who posts the information to it, its a middle and a technology dedicated to disintermediation will leave it behind.

As we get past web 2.0 as a buzz word and start placing our data and our tools on the edges of our domains so that others can create more value with them than we have the resources or intelligence to achieve by ourselves, the net will simply become what it was always designed to be, a transport mechanism for the knowledge created at the ends, it will start to approach John Gage's prediction that "The Internet IS the computer", to which we can add, "and our knowledge and skills are data and software in it".

Comments

[Sumitra Menon]

Web 3.0..practical web? Read this interesting definition by strategist Sramana Mitra! Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

[Jon Husband]

"and our knowledge and skills are data and software in it"

Beyond just the message, the medium is becoming the meaning we consume and create together.