How Would You Usurp the Web Browser?

cyclomedia wonders: "I've been thinking about this for a while now, and a recent article posturing about Web 3.0 brought forward some other suggestions which basically boiled down to 'what should be next.' Everyone here knows that HTML, Javascript and HTTPRequest are not the tools for building feature-rich interactive networked applications, but that doesn't stop Google, Microsoft and others from trying their best to use them to build office suites and the like. As one project puts it: 'we need to replace the Document Browser with an Application Browser.' So, let's get the ball rolling with my question: What type of platform would you like to see delivering the 'true' Web 2.0 in the not too distant future?"

Comments

'True' Web 2.0

[Z0mb1eman]

In other words... what might succeed at doing exactly what Java and Flash promised to do, but have failed?

I'm interested to find out that answer myself. :)

Re:'True' Web 2.0

[suv4x4]

In other words... what might succeed at doing exactly what Java and Flash promised to do, but have failed?

You're signing out Flash too quickly. I'd say give it a chance. I mean Flash 9 and Flex 2 are out just couple of months ago and Adobe also donated their supposedly (for Flash haters) "crappy" Flash 9 JS engine to Firefox, which will replace SpiderMonkey in the near future.

Flash currently has the best ECMA4 implementation out there, and fastest. And it's available right now, today, on all browsers, on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Not usurp, but augment.

[Pfhorrest]

I think a better question would be: Why Would you Usurp the Web Browser?

I thought the summary alone made it pretty clear why you'd want something beyond a web browser. The web is (or at least, was designed as) a network of hypertexts. This would now properly be expanded to a network of hypermedia, but the point remains the same: it's function is to present documents, and link from one document to another. Text, images, sounds, movies, all that fits well enough into this model; even database output is basically nothing more than all of the above organized in a different way than a standard file system would do it, and databases can implement all variety of useful things like the web forum that we're chatting on without really breaking that model.

But when you start getting fancy complicated interactive applications crammed into that model, it gets ugly and breaks. Games, document editors, all that sort of stuff belongs in an *application* framework, not a document framework. And mind you, I find a lot of these networked applications very useful, but still, they don't belong in the Web; they belong in something else, an Application Browser to go along with your Document Browser. Though honestly, I'd just do away with the whole "browser" concept entirely and treat internet documents and applications the same as you would a doc or app on the other side of your LAN, which is not much different than you treat local docs and apps, besides permissions differences).

I guess this is my answer to the question in the summary, too. I'd take all applications out of the browser entirely and integrate the browser functions into something like, to use OSX examples, Finder and Preview; maybe merge the two together into one program, for browsing (local and remote) filesystems and viewing (local and remote) documents. Include a plugin architecture to allow extensibility of format support (and heck, if you allow editing of documents therein too, you're moving awfully close to a document-centric computing model, at last!).

Then standardize on a cross-platform API (Java is a possible candidate), and then when you click a link to a remote application (from your browser/finder/explorer thing), that app is quickly downloaded and cached on your end and run like any other local program, with the exception of different privileges and such. These programs might just call back to their home server for their data, in the case of something like a simple game, or they could allow you to read and write data from your local disks. The advantage of using a remote app in the latter case would of course be not having to worry about upgrading or anything - the only version that's available to use is the latest version. The disadvantage of course being if that app is unavailable, well, maybe you're stuck without the ability to open your data, even if it is stored locally. But open file formats could help there.

So, I guess that's my solution. Fat chance of it ever happening though.