At the risk of repeating an old saw, when you only have a hammer,
everything looks like a nail. Our hammer has been the Web browser. It
has been crippling the software industry for the past eight years and
it will kill productivity at any company that introduces major
enterprise applications on its intranet.
Should we get rid of the browser? No, no more than we should get rid
of the hammer. The browser is a useful tool. It needs to cease being
the only tool, and it could use some improvement.
Problems With Today's Browsers
Surprise! IE6 Takes Browser Lead
The first networks that were the foundation of the Internet went
online in the late 1960s. For the next 25 years, the Internet remained
the exclusive province of technocrats. The browser changed all that,
giving real people unprecedented access to information.
The Web browser has one big advantage: The basic functionality needed
to read an article is fairly easy to use, and even novice users can
view content from across the world in a reasonably nice layout.
That's it for the benefits. Browsers fail to support the actual task
of browsing the Web. Netscape Navigator does not have many navigation
features, and Internet Explorer does not help users explore new
information spaces. Page viewing is truly all they excel at. Movement
between pages and the ability to understand where you have been and
where you can go? Forget about it.
Within months, the browser was running out of steam, and programmers
struggled to get beyond the confines of HTML, designed purely to
display fixed text and graphics pages. The answer was JavaScript, a
huge kludge that accelerated the move to two-way communication within
Web pages. Java Script should be considered a kludge because its
syntax is often antithetical to HTML, and because JavaScript was
designed to be hidden within HTML comments, so the HTML wouldn't know
it was there. Kludge, kludge, kludge.
From the programmer's point of view, it was expedient. Unfortunately,
it had the side effect of stopping everyone who wasn't a programmer
dead in his or her tracks. No one but the priesthood could develop
advanced Web pages.
Eventually, a new standard for dynamic HTML promised to give back some
of the power wrested away by the programmers, but infighting among the
browser publishers has continued to hold back its implementation.
Because the browser's capabilities were, for all practical purposes,
frozen four years ago, the browser has failed utterly in its attempts
to keep up with the increasing demands of Web users.
How bad are these failings? Many basic capabilities that we took for
granted on microcomputers in the late 1970s remain absent from today's
browser technology. "Weblications," applications designed to be used
under browsers, may run hundreds of times more slowly than the same
types of applications on a 1978 Apple II.
Can anything be done about it? Yes — as long as you control the
browser environment in which your users will run your weblications.
Given such total control, developers can make use of third-party
plug-ins that work around the problems. Lacking that control,
developers must continue to turn out software no one would have dared
release in the 1970s. Why do we keep using the browser if it is so
bad? It is the only game in town — the only way ordinary people can
access the wonders of the Web. For all its failings, it is still far
better than nothing, and nothing is the only alternative.
What went wrong? Microsoft. By forcing Netscape Communications and Sun
Microsystems out of the market, it eliminated the competition. As a
result, all competitive pressure to fix the problem has been
eliminated. (Just think: If Microsoft had as effectively stymied Apple
Computer early on, we'd all still be using MS DOS.)
If you are unwilling to assign all culpability to Bill Gates, we can
also blame Netscape for allowing this to happen. Maybe it would have
lost in any case, but several releases of the Netscape browser seemed
to have no goal except increasing the bug count, allowing for more
fancy page viewing and adding features that did not facilitate Web
browsing. Robust code quality and features to support users' goals
took the backseat, thus making it unreasonably easy for Microsoft to
win.
Information Broadcasting
Major news stories about such topics as the Olympics and election
returns jam everything up today. In the future, such information will
be streamed; people will pick it up "live," as it passes by, rather
than forcing each individual to stand in line at the window and beg
for a plateful of information. Instead of a browser window, you'll
have windows onto continuously changing data streams. Yes, it can be
faked today, but using tomorrow's technology, even data-intensive
streams won't bring down the Internet because everyone will tap into
the same stream.
Broadcasting will become a major player on the Web. Already we are
seeing hundreds of radio stations take to the Net. TV stations are
waiting in the wings, waiting for true high-speed, wide-bandwidth
Internet connections.
In the future, you will buy a set-top box that picks up cable,
satellite or terrestrial signals, along with hundreds and hundreds of
Internet channels. Guess what? There still won't be anything on. The
beauty of it will be that by the time you discover that fact, you'll
be into a new half-hour and it will be time to start looking all over
again.
Many of those hundreds of channels will be specialty broadcasts, with
far greater variation than we see in today's biography, pet-lovers and
romance-movie channels. You will have channels dedicated to stamp
collectors, snake lovers and pig farmers. Just as we are seeing today,
the quality of the programming will drop in inverse relationship to
the number of channels available.
Weblications
Web applications will become indistinguishable from traditional
applications. The productivity losses are stunning as long as we force
complex transactions to take place in an interface for filling out
forms that resembles nothing more than the IBM 3270 terminals from the
1960s. Either the browser manufacturers will begin to support Web
applications properly, or someone else will supply the tools.
Currently, the main argument in favor of supplying application
functionality through a Web browser is that users won't have to
install software on their own computers. It is true that software
installation can lead to a nightmare of support problems as unexpected
parts of the system stop working. Windows is so brittle that users
rightly resent having to add new software to any computer that still
retains most of its faculties. In the future, traditional applications
will be updated seamlessly over the Web. It will be possible to get
the best of both worlds: Network computing frees the user from having
to act as system administrator, and personal computing dedicates a
powerful system to being immediately responsive to the user's smallest
whim. Why not cache application functionality on the user's local hard
disk and download upgrades transparently as they are needed?
Future Services
Most people think browsers are the Web and the Web is the Internet.
Yet these same people use a different Internet service every day:
e-mail. Many of them use a completely different Internet tool as well:
peer-to-peer sharing à la Napster. In the future, many more separate
and distinct software and hardware tools will appear. We are already
seeing Internet "radio sets" that pick up commercial-laden Internet
"broadcasts." The aforementioned TV tuners will follow.
Tomorrow's audio-visual receivers will likely have music-on-demand
capabilities, so that you can draw from a vast library of
DVD-audio-quality music, in effect sporting a multithousand-song
"jukebox" in your very own living room. If Hollywood and the recording
industry support such a phenomenon, they will make a fortune charging
consumers a few cents per song per play. If they don't support it, the
music will cost consumers even less.
Movies-on-demand, the great promise of a decade ago, will finally be a
reality, as long as greed doesn't get in the way. With high-speed
connections, a two-hour film in high-definition TV quality will be
downloaded to a local player in a few minutes. Charge 50 cents or a
dollar per viewing, and people will gladly pay. Charge more, and they
will watch for free, even if it isn't HDTV-quality.
Books await paper-white, high-resolution, portable displays. When they
arrive, the trees will finally be able to breathe easier.
The so-called convergence will finally happen. Come across a neat film
on your laptop and "throw it" to your TV, which will then contact a
movies-on-demand supplier and show it to you. Pick up something
interesting on a TV news show and "throw it" to your desktop computer,
so you can dive into the story in depth.
Communications
The real revolution will be in communications. Live videophone will be
practical for the first time. No more murky pictures and total lack of
interoperability. Pictures will be life-size or bigger, and will
appear in living color.
Videophone, as with most new consumer technologies, will first be
embraced by the sex industry, but it will quickly spread. Students and
businesspeople torn from their homes will be able to remain in close
and intimate contact. Work groups scattered across the globe will be
able to glance into one another's offices and talk casually in a way
that is difficult even when they are located in the same building.
The "chat rooms" where people type at each other will be replaced by
face-to-face meetings. At first, many will be disappointed by the
disappearance of the anonymity of the keyboard, but soon they will
take to the new medium. Most of the problems associated with chat
rooms where children are concerned will be swept away as the sleazy
creeps who would pretend to be young slink back into their dark
corners.
Enough Is Enough
Web pages are not even a good metaphor for accessing information. As
we have discussed, several other forms of information access are
needed for the Internet to reach its potential. We also need better
ways of visualizing the information space so that users don't get lost
so easily. The move toward business-to-business services, extranets
and complex applications delivered over the Web makes the need to go
beyond the browser even more pressing. Billions of dollars are wasted
every year in lost productivity as people wait for Web pages to
perform duties that could have been handled better by a 1984
Macintosh-style graphical user interface application. Enough. Browsers
kicked off the Web revolution, but it's time to retire them to their
rightful place in the Computer Museum and get more powerful tools to
support the hours of work and play we are all going to spend on the
Internet every day in the future. |
