Is the web browser on life support?
It took me a couple of days of reading reactions and reviews of the Apple Watch to notice someone say that there is no Safari browser installed on the Watch. It hadn’t really occurred to me until that point, but of course there isn’t. Who would want to browse web page on a tiny device attached to their wrist?
But it did start me wondering that as technology becomes ever more personal, is there a future for the web browser? At least the browser that we know today?
A short history
The web started off as primitive plainly formatted text. Dial-up speeds were frustratingly slow, so pages were about as basic as they get.
As connection speeds improved, the browsers that rendered the web pages slowly added features, and web developers became more laissez-faire over the size of their web-pages. Images got bigger, pages became more interactive and simple news articles became littered with sidebars, ads and dreaded popups. Soon enough, a single web pages contained multiple megabytes of data, and the user had a worse time viewing these pages.
Then the mobile web became a ‘thing’. Mobile devices were attached to the Internet via slow cellular networks and suddenly we had to worry about page sizes and download speeds all over again.
But the web development industry was already too used to the luxury of fast broadband speeds.
Here’s Tumblr’s co founder, Marco Arment, recently lamenting the state of the modern web:
“I don’t know if the web’s decline in relevance can be turned around, but megabytes of Javascript frameworks and cluttered layouts full of widgets and garbage ads aren’t helping.
They’re not as necessary or beneficial to web developers as most of them think, either. Web development has never been more complicated or convoluted than it is today due to the sheer quantity of tools (and their rapid rate of change) involved in most modern web-dev environments.”
Whilst web design has caught up with the mobile browser (for example, responsive design), web development seems to still lives in a desktop-first world which is killing the user experience.
Is was only 4 years ago that Facebook were declaring their backing for HTML5 as a platform instead of going the native app route. At first glance it seems like a sensible approach. Why develop multiple versions of the same app for iOS, Android and Windows when you can develop once for all devices.
Yet today it is a widely accepted argument that content consumed on native apps is simply a better user experience.
Enter native apps
Mobile apps have taken off in a way that even Steve Jobs probably couldn’t have foreseen. Indeed he didn’t even want apps on the iPhone at first. Now they’re part of our daily lives.
The web browser on the other hand, seems positively dumb these days. Here Ben Evans on the power of mobile apps:
“There’s an old computer science saying that a computer should never ask you a question that it should be able to work out the answer to; a smartphone can work out much more. It can see who your friends are, where you spend your time, what photos you’ve taken, whether you’re walking or running and what your credit card is. The sensors, APIs and data that are available (with permission – mostly) to a service you want to use on a smartphone are vastly greater than for a website isolated within a web browser on a PC. Each of those sensors and APIs creates a new business, or many new businesses, that could not exist on a PC.”
So does it make sense that everyone ditch their websites and release an app instead?
Ben Evans again:
“Do you have the kind of relationship, and proposition, that people will want to engage with. enough to put your icon on their phone? If the answer to this is ‘yes’, then you should have an app – if only because the app store is the way to do that that people understand, and they’ll look for you in the app store. Once that app is there, you can leverage all the interesting and sophisticated things that you might do with it, or you might manage the flow of information just like your website, but the app has to be there.
If you don’t have that relationship, then all the clever things you can imagine you could do with Apple or Google’s new APIs are irrelevant and your strategy should focus on the web (and social). (By extension, of course, there are some people legitimately wondering if they should have their own website – should a plumber be on the web or in Yelp?)”
So no, it doesn’t make sense for everyone yet to have a presence in the App Store. At least not yet.
You don’t have to develop your own app though – you can build on another platform. For instance Domino’s pizza chain now let their U.S. customers order a pizza via a tweet. Google’s rumoured new Buy Button feature will allow buyers to bypass an online shop’s checkout system and buy directly from Google.
And of course, Facebook’s recently announced Instant Articles will allow their users to read third-party rich media publications directly within the Facebook app.
Let’s put aside the question of whether it’s a good idea for publications or shops to put all their eggs into a third-party basket for now.
Facebook’s argument is that the experience of reading Instant Articles is far superior to that of viewing the content on a bloated, slower website. Instant Articles offer all the pros of a webpage e.g. custom design, brand and immersive multimedia articles, but with the speed of native apps.
Similarly Google will offer mobile users a more trustworthy way of purchasing goods from online stores without having to navigate badly-designed checkout pages from their phone or tablet.
So is the end of the web browser in sight? John Gruber thinks browser usage has peaked:
“I’ve been making this point for years, but it remains highly controversial. HTML/CSS/JavaScript rendered in a web browser – that part of the web has peaked. Running servers and client apps that speak HTTP(S) – that part of the web continues to grow and thrive.”
Om Malik however, is more disparaging of the content owners:
“If you need Facebook to solve the page load problem, then as media entity you need to be darwined.”
In conclusion then, there is certainly evidence to suggest a shift in how people are consuming the Internet.
Businesses, organisations, content owners, platforms and publishers need to start think already how this is going to affect them and how they should be building this knowledge into their digital strategies.
But they should also be aware of how damaging a poor experience on their current sites will push users away ever quicker.
Bear that in mind before you agree to allow a pop up immersive animated advert on your homepage.
I’ll leave you with this quote from Peter-Paul Koch:
“Web does not have to emulate native, web has to capitalise on its own strengths, primarily its reach, which still outstrips native and will continue to do so as long as we have more than one native platform.”
MediaTank is a video platform designed for digital agencies. Manage all your client’s video content in one place.
