Dave Hyatt on Uber-browsers

Dave Hyatt, Safari devel­oper, is won­der­ing about the future of the browser.

As usual, it comes down to whether we need appli­ca­tions that do one thing fast and well, or super­ap­pli­ca­tions that deal with a group of related tasks. Look­ing at Mozilla, a won­der­ful browser that prac­ti­cally wob­bles when you look at it due to all the extra weight of unnec­es­sary fea­tures, and Safari, a not-​so-​great browser that’s barely there and whizzes you around the inter­net at break­neck speed, it seems that single-​use is best. And Hyatt is spot on when he says

“I’d like to be able to click on an RSS file link in a browser and have it auto­mat­i­cally pass that off to my news appli­ca­tion. One click should be all it takes to get me sub­scribed, whether that click hap­pens in a mail app, a Web page, or inside Net­NewsWire itself.”

Lots of little appli­ca­tions that play nice with each other is cer­tainly prefer­able to some clunky great thing chock full of spe­cial­ist fea­tures. Unless, of course, somone finds a way to make an appli­ca­tion chock full of spe­cial­ist fea­tures that isn’t clunky.

The inter­est­ing thing here is that Hyatt is musing about all this in public, and so invit­ing feed­back from users. Unfor­tu­nately, that feed­back is only going to come from the sort of users who read soft­ware developers’ weblogs, and I’m guess­ing that isn’t a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sample of the brows­ing public.

Posted at 12pm on 27/01/03 by Jack Mottram to the mac category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us