The Browser Is Dead: Long Live the Browser!

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in internet on (#3M2)
story imageGeorgio 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?

Re: I don't care if it's made of gold and makes me coffee (Score: 1)

by songofthepogo@pipedot.org on 2014-05-18 22:19 (#1Q9)

The skeevy Google tracking prevented me from falling in love with the Nexus 7 (and from using any stand-alone Google products on my computer). I really wanted to love it. It's a nice piece of kit, but I felt so icky-sticky with how very much Google was getting its fingers all over me that I returned it within a week. That was my first and, so far, only Android experience (I'm still cheesed off at myself that I wasn't clever enough to set up a throw-away Google account before trying it out). We're getting an Acer C720 on Tuesday and I'm planning on immediately putting some flavor of linux on it.

On the Firefox memory issue, I just read that a major contributing culprit could be my won't-live-without-it Adblock extension . The linked post explains briefly why that's the case, but also points out:
Of course, it should also be noted that Firefox (and Chrome, let's not leave anyone out) can also be a pretty big memory hog on its own without any extensions.
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