Browser War 2.0 - the race for the mobile web: Firefox vs. Opera vs. Flock

The browser, that we use today on our desktop computers root back to the early 1990’s, when web was versioning perhaps web 0.5. Today in a world of web 2.0 with webservices and other trends of disaggregation of the classical website plus the social elements and multiplied by more and more users connecting via small screen mobile devices to the internet, things will change. Web 2.0 and the mobile web will need a new browsing metaphor. The race has already begun, browser war 2.0 seems to be the next big thing.

Those days I often think back to the early 1990’s, when the internet just began. I remember the moment when I installed a hot new program called Mosaic on my Mac, connected then via a modem to an also hot new local internet-provider and began surfing the internet. Instead of the textbased, shell-like commandline interfaces of the BBS’s I was used to or the directory-like Gopher / FTP clients, suddenly there was a page layouted similar to a magazine, with images and text side by side! As trivial that may sound today, in the early 1990’s this was amazing.

It looked “spectacular” as this:

WIRED Magazine wrote in October 1994: “When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing. If this sounds wrong, consider Mosaic. Mosaic is the celebrated graphical “browser” that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic’s charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext “links” to other documents. By following the links - click, and the linked document appears - you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.”

Today I consider Mosaic as the piece of software, that defined for me, what “the Internet” is. And obviously not just for me: Mosaic defined, what every browser afterwards (Netscape, Internet Explorer or Firefox and Opera) had at least to do. In fact, Mosaic startet it all by defining the Point-and-Click interface metaphor for website navigation and the integration of text, links, images and multimedia elements on a single page.

And that’s why over the last years when web 2.0 was evolving I personally found it more and more uncomfortable, to do everything I as the user has to do in a web 2.0 universe, where everything seems to be disaggregated into RSS or website API’s. Also it turned out, that it is also more and more uncomfortable to manage the shifted paradigm of not just surfing and reading the web, but also quickly responding and adding content by one self. Things went even worse after I got a mobile phone, which could connect to the internet. Although the browser (Opera Mini) on the device did a good job in squeezing page layouts to the tiny phone screen it is still really complicated to upload a picture I’ve taken with the camera of the phone to my Flickr account.

I realized, that if the use of the web changes, the software to use the web has also to change. Then, some days ago I discovered Flock. And I felt like 1992 again! This browser is practically an evolution of everything there is now - and in a sense of web 2.0 it will do what Mosaic did 1992. It integrates all the webservices and API’s in your browsing experience in a centralized and usable manner.

For instance, sharing a photo from your Flickr photostream with a friend from Facebook is like this (drag and drop):

This is also needed for mobile browsing of the internet. Todays browsers like Opera Mini or NetFront do all a great job in trying to mimic the look and feel of the big screen on your tiny loRes device. You see examples below (ThunderHawk Mobile web browser on the left, NetFront on the right):

But what if screens get bigger and sharper, like the iPhone? because you’re nearer to the screen, resolution and look-and-feel are almost comparable to a desktop computer. And the next years will surely bring mobile surfing very close to desktop surfing by means of screen-resolution.

If you have used Flock on a Desktop you also want it on a Mobile. The integration of webservices and the possibility to interact with the web 2.0 are quite unparalleled. Since Flock is based on Gecko (Firefox) I’m looking forward to Firefox Mobile, which seems to be under the way. Also Google’s Android should heavily incorporate webservices and web 2.0 features. The next months will be exciting - and I think we all will tell in 15 years about the great changes that we witnessed those days on how we used the internet.

PS: This is my first post done with Flock! It works really great.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock, Opera Mini, Firefox, web 2.0, mobile internet, mobile, web, interface metaphor, interface