Comments on: my ideal mobile browser http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2008/05/27/my-ideal-mobile-browser/ designing the mobile user experience Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:55:46 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: steven http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2008/05/27/my-ideal-mobile-browser/comment-page-1/#comment-40377 steven Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:05:32 +0000 http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/?p=430#comment-40377 Well, you can call it a "super-browser" if you like, but either way it's becoming an experience less like a classic browser. I base this on my browsing experience: around 80% is on a small number of sites, which are mostly interactive, data-intensive web apps, as opposed to more hypermedia-like classic websites. Usage figures seem to indicate I am not a total outlier here. I also am informed by some work on actual products. Years ago (and I presume technology is better now) I worked on an abortive portal project. We did demonstrate getting any old content from the internet to display in portlets on this custom portal page. Thankfully it was scrapped due to being far outside the strategic vision of the organization, and while it had issues of scale and IP (whose content is it then?), it did work. More recently, including right now, I am working on mobile applications that are secretly web browsers. They look like apps, and only work with the content intended, and have some stuff removed and added to achieve this end, but are at their heart mobile web browsers. This extension of web to general-internet-app (plus push notification, and maybe a good, universally-deployed <a href="http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2007/11/26/could-2008-be-the-year-of-the-mobile-widget-2009/" rel="nofollow">widget</a> engine) is terribly exciting to me, and points to the future I envision. Well, you can call it a “super-browser” if you like, but either way it’s becoming an experience less like a classic browser. I base this on my browsing experience: around 80% is on a small number of sites, which are mostly interactive, data-intensive web apps, as opposed to more hypermedia-like classic websites. Usage figures seem to indicate I am not a total outlier here.

I also am informed by some work on actual products. Years ago (and I presume technology is better now) I worked on an abortive portal project. We did demonstrate getting any old content from the internet to display in portlets on this custom portal page. Thankfully it was scrapped due to being far outside the strategic vision of the organization, and while it had issues of scale and IP (whose content is it then?), it did work.

More recently, including right now, I am working on mobile applications that are secretly web browsers. They look like apps, and only work with the content intended, and have some stuff removed and added to achieve this end, but are at their heart mobile web browsers. This extension of web to general-internet-app (plus push notification, and maybe a good, universally-deployed widget engine) is terribly exciting to me, and points to the future I envision.

]]> By: Mind Booster Noori http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2008/05/27/my-ideal-mobile-browser/comment-page-1/#comment-40358 Mind Booster Noori Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:06:58 +0000 http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/?p=430#comment-40358 I agree with every bit of your concept for mobile browsers... I don't think that this is an "un-browser", I see this as the future of browsers. If you make a paralel with other kinds browsers (most obviously desktop browsers) you'll see that they also are trying to adapt themselves to give you a better usage and user experience, doing lot's of other things than just being a browser (surfing/rendering), and if you look, for instance, into the list of firefox plugins you'll see that most of them aren't for "browsing"... Let's just hope that this ideas turn out implemented :-) I agree with every bit of your concept for mobile browsers… I don’t think that this is an “un-browser”, I see this as the future of browsers. If you make a paralel with other kinds browsers (most obviously desktop browsers) you’ll see that they also are trying to adapt themselves to give you a better usage and user experience, doing lot’s of other things than just being a browser (surfing/rendering), and if you look, for instance, into the list of firefox plugins you’ll see that most of them aren’t for “browsing”…

Let’s just hope that this ideas turn out implemented :-)

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