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.
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