ON OVERLOADED BROWSERS

THE PROBLEM OF PLENTY

Chris Anderson has a good post on how "embedded applicatons" are likely to be increasingly preferable to applications accessed EITHER on a local computer (Microsoft) OR on a web-site (Google). 

They're likely to be yet more new things we browsers consume via the browser.  Not to mention what Umair over at Bubblegeneration calls "Viral Funpacks", like the virally distributed music player on MySpace.

Let me explain.

I just finished re-reading a thorough review from back in July by ExtremeTech, of the upcoming versions of browsers from Microsoft, Firefox, and Opera, representing the bulk of the choices in today's browser market.

And I came away feeling under-whelmed by the innovation that's ahead of us when these beta products finally reach gold.

For the most part, it's about each of them playing a little bit of catch-up with the others on existing features, with Microsoft's IE having to do more than most.  You only have to look at this check-list matrix of features to get a sense that this was the rear-view mirror being used by the development teams at all the shops.

I had a hard time staying awake just reading the "final conclusions" page of the review mentioned above.

The big, disruptive innovations like tabbed browsing, which I've raved about in the past, are fewer and far between.

And over the past few months, the features that I most wanted to see, like auto-syncing browsers across multiple computers, have come from third-party software developers in the form of extensions (Google with it's Google Sync,  in the case of the example cited).

This seeming dearth of browser innovation is coming at a time, when there's an increasingly dire need for innovations...in coping with the amount of stuff that mainstream users are expected to "browse" through.

Besides the "embedded apps" and "viral funpacks" mentioned above, we're also seeing more stuff come at us via the browser.

Fred Wilson has a good post titled "Exploding Messaging" today anecdotally highlighting the number of ways we can communicate online today vs. a decade ago, including site-messaging that Jason Calacanis talks about at length in this separate post. 

Site messaging is simply using the browser as your email and IM client on any given web page, rather than a dedicated email site or standalone email software client.  Many MySpace users seem to prefer this approach for their email and instant messaging. 

Fred has a killer punch-line:

"As a sender, I love the explosion of messaging options.

But as a recipient, I hate it."

We're increasingly receiving this stuff, be they site messages, embedded apps, viral funpacks, RSS feeds, video, audio, tagged favorites, etc., mostly via our browsers.

And they're not keeping up with better ways to view it, digest it, store it, retrieve it, share it, and/or track it over time.

This time last year, Yahoo! announced that Yahoo! Search had reached a significant milestone:

"...our index provides access to over 20 billion items.  This includes just over 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files."

The numbers have all likely gone up this year, but the following questions came to mind:

• When do we go from 1.6 billion images to 19.2 billion images?
• When do go from 50 million audio and video files on the web to 19.2 billion audio and video files on the web?
• And given some of these data types take a longer time for humans to linearly digest than plain, old text documents, what kind of software innovations will be needed to be able to "Browse" through this stuff as efficiently as possible?

What are the development teams at Microsoft, Firefox, Opera, along with the folks at Google, Yahoo!, Apple, AOL, etc. doing in terms of thinking about these challenges?

I know it's easy to complain about lack of innovation, than coming up with innovations.

So, in order to do my part, I'd like to suggest two innovations, to better improve working with tabs in browsers.

1.  I often find myself with twenty or thirty tabs open in a Firefox window while researching a topic, that leads down multiple paths across multiple topics.

And I love the feature found both in Firefox and Opera, along with the future version of IE, to be able to save all the tabs in a single Bookmark file, to be opened later.

What I'd like though is the ability to SELECT, SAVE, and OPEN a sub-set of those tabs in a different browser window.  This would help a user to organize the various tabs into sub-topics that can either be tackled later, or tackled immediately in a separate window without the clutter of the other tabs.

2.  Next, I'd love to have a one-button way to save the above tabbed bookmarks for OFF-LINE retrieval.  I know one can save individual web pages for off-line browsing by saving it as a .MHT file, but that's too cumbersome and geeky for most mainstream users. 

Given that most computers are coming with bigger hard drives capacities than we know what to do with, this would be a great feature to help users digest the data at their own pace, whether they're online or off.

I could keep going, but I think you get the idea, and can come up with other innovations that you'd love to see in the next generation of browsers.

Who knows, we might see these innovation from Apple, who, lest we forget, is also focused on improving the browser experience via Safari.