Georgio Venturi over at the Ubuntu User Experience Blog posits that the browser as we currently know it
can't go on in the smartphone age . OK, fair enough: a traditional browser on a smartphone isn't going to be a great experience.
With the unstoppable rise of mobile apps, some pundits within the tech industry have hastily demoted the mobile web to a second-class citizen, or even dismissed it as 'dead'. Who cares about websites and webapps when you can deliver a superior user experience with a native app? Well, we care because the reality is a bit different. New apps are hard to discover; their content is locked, with no way to access it from the outside. People browse the web more than ever on their mobile phones. The browser is the most used app on the phone, both as starting point and a destination in the user journey.
Venturi goes on to describe innovations to the
Ubuntu phone browser interface that make it more useful. Not exactly the only new browser out there though, so I don't get all the fuss.
LinkBubble ,
Opera ,
Dolphin , and others all make alternative browsers that try to improve the user experience on a phone. Why all the hubbub?
1. if the only 'innovating' you are doing is aping someone else's UI, you are in a bad place. Nobody won by copying the other.
2. essentially the same comment, but: considering how many ways there are to improve browsers, is the widget set the only thing you could find to fix?
What keeps me off Chrome is all the skeevy Google tracking. What keeps me on Chrome is this new Chromebook :( It's also a decent browser. But Google is increasingly creeping me out. Firefox should be scooping up disaffected Chrome users. But they're not, because increasingly Mozilla Foundation's browser really sucks balls. And I am so fed up with the constant plug-in is out of date stuff, or checking plug-ins on boot time, etc. Find a better architecture! And fix those memory leaks! You are the Titanic, guys!