Building a new Web Browsing experience
I've recently started to work on my diploma thesis, which is supposed to end my studies on Faculty of Multimedia Communications of Tomas Bata University in Zlin. I am aiming for a degree in Digital Design. This means designing UIs, websites, games, digital products, visual communication or doing videomapping. Not that it would have been possible to even touch some decent level of expertise in all of these. After a few assignments every student chooses her own niche and tries to master her own skillset.
At the end, every student writes diploma thesis. I will document the progress of working on it and hopefully learn a lot more while preparing for writing every new article. For you, it could mean a little bit of history of the Web and a bigger portion of thoughts where and how it could move next. I will include links and additional relevant resources to dive in.
In the pilot article, let's sum up the background of this series.
Why a new Web Browsing experience
I was born 1995, first computer in our family was running Windows XP and I spent too much time on it. Those were days when Web was booming tech, wild and free space with infinite pages to dive in and content to explore.
During time I got into making websites. It was easy way to make money, simple to learn, work from anywhere. Gradually I moved from coding to programming and from websites to web apps. But while other programmers were jumping into Swift and Android apps, I stayed loyal to ancient technologies of the Web. I still believe in the idea of an unchained and free space where anyone can publish anything, content is not surrounded with personalised ads, the photos can't be deleted by a content moderator and where the data belong to its authors and not to the company running the platform.
Of course internet has changed, and so did we. And there has been a lot of buzz about how the Web should exist in this new environment. The most influencing articles for me were from Mike Hearn published in 2017. It contains links to other interesting articles and has three parts.
Most importantly, it revealed some shocking new ideas of how Web should work and Web browsers should look. The idea, that Web browser doesn't need any URLs and refresh button, seemed daring that time, but now start to gain more attention.
When the time came to choose the theme of my diploma thesis, the path was all set up. If there was a time the Web needs concepts of where it should go next (if anywhere), it is now. In the next articles of this series we will go through how current web browsers work from the user's point of view, what are the interesting concepts already in place and we will set up field for new browsers to come.
This journey will take us all the way from the birth of the Web technologies, through the depression of the current Web till up to the infinite where the Web is heading now, finally ending with a design and hopefully a working new web browser.
During the next 9 months I will try to pass as much knowledge as possible into these articles. If you are ready for a ride, hit the follow button.
This article is part of Designing the New Web Browser publication, you can continue to the following post: Part 2: The Birth of a Web Browser.
