What could a browser be?
Published on under the IndieWeb category.
The latest CSS Tricks newsletter has me energised about what browsers could be. The newsletter makes this point:
My point here is this: what we think browsers are today are not what they’ll be in the future. And because of that, I’m excited about browsers for the first time in a real long time.
I don’t have any bold ideas about what could make an amazing browser experience. I’m very happy with Firefox (if you’re not already using Firefox, I would strongly encourage you to give it a try). Firefox fills my needs just fine, both on the browsing, privacy, and developer sides of thinking. But then again there must be new fortes in this market.
What would a browser look like that is curated specifically for developers? What would a decentralized web browser look like? Blisk exists to fulfill the former need; Beaker Browser and a few other projects are looking at the last. When I found out about Beaker – although it does not look to be under active maintenance to the extent it once was – I thought to myself: wow, we’re really not at the end of how browsers interact with the web.
Beaker excited me because it portrayed a read-write web where you could develop and publish content in the same place. Imagine that. Beaker used a peer-to-peer architecture, too. Your computer could run your site easily with minimal configuration required. I can’t claim to fully understand it but what I have seen makes me want to see more. I want to see new takes on browsers.
The CSS Tricks article names a few examples of new browsers with different takes on browsing. There’s a browser that has a snap to the side feature for some web pages, Sidekick. Isn’t that cool? I tried Sidekick when it was quite new. It didn’t quite meet my needs but it has come a long way since then, expanding the scope of what we think of as a browser. What else can we do?
So-called Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) get me hyped-up about the future of the web. Push notifications on iOS intiated by the browser might be coming soon. That would be amazing. And there’s so much more we can do with PWAs. (Although I’d really appreciate it if Apple let people use a different browser engine. I was shocked when I found out that Apple doesn’t allow different browser engines on iOS.)