Ceci n'est pas une webbrowser

The painter Magritte was right: not everything you see is what it appears to be.

The first web browser was released in 1991 (contrary to popular believe this was not Mosaic, which was only released 2 years later). For the next 10 years, browser evolution only meant 1 thing:

Let's display & navigate HTML pages.

Today, the web browser is far more then just a HTML user agent. The browser is the home and testing base for new technologies. Thinking about feeds? You saw it first in Internet Explorer "channels". Want to see how widgets will change the internet? Look at the innovative Opera browser. Ever wondered what helped Flash become widely accepted? See how it became one of the first must-have browser plugins.

The fact that people spend more and more of their computing time in a browsing environment is further stimulating the enrichment of the browser with various plug-ins. The people behind Firefox understood this very well. They made the best plug-in architecture possible, resulting in a very flexible framework. This is to a large extend the reason why Firefox was able to compete against the almost-monopoly of Internet Explorer. This brings us to a next role of webbrowsers:

The webbrowser has become an innovation platform

Thanks to the popularity of the web, the browser becomes an obvious choice to distribute new technology. From a classical windows application, it is more difficult to interact with web content. It is also more difficult to stay "top of mind" with the user, since most people seldomly use their cluttered "Start menu" shortcuts. Being in the browser means being in the face of the user.

When we look at mobile phones, this is even more valid. Since a phone is expected to always work without the user needing to perform maintenance tasks on it, the application frameworks on smartphones are very restrictive. Look at Symbian, Android, iPhone SDK and to a lesser extend Windows Mobile and you'll see that developing applications for these platforms means working with both hands tied. The barrier to make software for mobile devices is at least 10 times higher then on the desktop.

It is therefore that the webbrowser will be the application platform of the future. The web provides a proven innovation platform. Starting as a mere hypertext browsing system, it is evolving into an application platform with Javascript, widgets, semantic descriptions and syndication protocols. The inherent openness of the platform makes this a much better candidate for innovation. No, the web does not provide the best architecture for an application framework, but the attractiveness of the browser will make it the most popular application execution platform in the years to come.

Whatever the functionality will be, however the technology will look like, one thing is certain:

We will call it a webbrowser.