The Members Forum

With more and more applications moving into the cloud, the old republic of installed software is in danger of falling. A new online empire promises security, stability, and even portability, but at its head is an evil emperor, the web browser. This is how productivity dies, with thunderous back buttons and multipurpose address bars.

Search your feelings; you know it to be true. Do you really want to compose all your documents in an application that erases your work if you accidentally hit the backspace key one time too many?

I think we need a prequel to explain what’s really going on here. Like most villains, the browser started out life innocently enough. Back in the early 90s, at a time when universities and other large institutions were the only ones with Internet access, the World Wide Web was just one of several competing Internet protocols students and researchers used to share information.

Back in those days, when I was trying to decide whether to put my college literary magazine up as a Gopher site or a Web site, nobody expected the browser to become the center of the computing experience. With a UI that was and still is based on a book stack metaphor–pages, universal resource locators, bookmarks, links–the browser was meant to be your digital librarian, not your application shell. It’s that research-library legacy that makes even the latest browsers unsuited for serious content creation, no matter how good their web apps are.

The goal of a content application, whether it’s Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop, is to help you edit files, whether those are documents, images, or C# programs. While you are working on a piece of content, the menus you need to edit that piece of content (and others you may have open)  should dominate your experience. But if you look at the top of any browser—even the screen in Chrome OS—you’ll see several navigation elements that are designed to drive you away from your document. You have an address bar you can type into, a bookmarks menu to quickly shuttle you off to another place, and worst of all, a back button.

Laptopmag has the article HERE!