Category: History

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Raising your Browse

You might think that your world of browsing the web begins and ends with that little blue “e” logo on your desktop, but you might be surprised at just how many other (better?) alternatives exist out there. Over the years I’ve probably had a play with just about every web browser I can lay my hands on, but I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the others.

Browser life began in 1992 with the granddaddy of them all, Mosiac. However, after the famous “browser wars” between Netscape and Microsoft many years ago, it seemed like Internet Explorer was destined to be the only browsing kid on the block. Of course, for the alternative thinkers amongst us, there were some notable options like the wonderful Opera browser which just got better and better with every version, but for all intents and purposes it appeared that Microsoft had won the browser battle with the ubiquitous Internet Explorer. Was it a better browser? Probably not.

Like so many technologies, the race does not always go to the swiftest, strongest or most technically able, but to the one that gets the marketing edge over its opposition. Once this marketing edge begins to form a positive feedback loop the adoption rate starts to feed itself and it gets very difficult to justify an alternative, even if the dominant technology is not necessarily the best technology. Because Microsoft had the ability to bundle IE with its Windows operating system it was in a unique, and many say unfairly anticompetitive, position to force its browser onto users who didn’t even question this imposition. There was a browser built in to Windows, it was free, there was a shortcut on the desktop, so why not use it? Add to this the fact that Microsoft “extended” the ability of IE with a whole bunch of proprietary technologies such as Sharepoint, and people slowly got locked into the idea that the web needed IE to work properly…

Of course, Netscape never really went away. In a stroke of inspired genius, or possibly desperation, Netscape decided to give away the source code for its browser to the Open Source community and gave birth to the Mozilla Foundation. With a global volunteer workforce of dedicated programmers and engineers, the end result – Firefox – has evolved into what many believe is the world’s best web browser. With a sleek and lean codebase, sensible security features, plenty of extensibility and customisation options with Add-Ins and Themes, Firefox has plenty of good stuff to talk about. It’s fast, it’s powerful and it’s free, both as in speech and as in beer. Firefox has also forked off other into interesting browser projects such and Camino and Flock.

There are other players too, like Apple’s Safari, itself built on KHTML code, which forms the basis of KDE’s Konqueror, another browser with an Open Source Linux heritage. Using a variation of the KHTML source code, Apple developed a rendering engine called Webkit and this in turn spawned more browsers such as Shiira, OmniWeb, Sunrise, wKiosk, and Bumpercar. Webkit also forms the basis of a diverse range of other related web tools such as Adium, Growl, SubEthaEdit and Vienna.

As you can see, there are plenty to choose from, and every browser has its own distinct features or tools that its creator feels make it the “best” browser. In particular, this is true of Flock. I looked at this browser a while ago, but as so often happens when you look at lots of things quickly, its easy to overlook the obvious benefits. Flock is built on the core Firefox engine, so its fast and stable, but it also has a few added features which make it a pretty interesting alternative for anyone who does a lot of work with Web 2.0 tools. The Flock website describes it like this…

Flock is an amazing web browser built on fast and secure Mozilla technologies. View and share photos with an innovative new photo bar in the browser. Subscribe to your favorite websites to get the freshest content automatically, in summaries that are easy to save and blog. Search more quickly, more effectively, and more richly with the innovative Flock Search Toolbar. Download the Flock beta and you’ll be spreading the word that there’s a new way to web.

The Social Web Browser.Some of the neat things I’ve discovered in Flock (thanks to a chat I had with Judy O’Connell the other day) are the ways in which it integrates with services such as Flickr. Photos stored in your Flickr or Photobucket accounts can be easily accessed and added to blog posts, and with many new Nokia phones now having direct Flickr integration, this could get pretty interesting. Flock also has some pretty innovative features for storing photos or snippets of information that you find while browsing the Web, so you can reuse them later. The inbuilt search tools dig through not only the Web’s major search engines like Google and Yahoo! but also your own local bookmarks, giving and added richness to searches. It comes with a very easy to use inbuilt RSS feedreader, shared online bookmarks to del.icio.us or Shadows, and a neat blog integration feature that let’s you select any text on a webpage to instantly create a post about it and add it to your blog… (in fact, this post you’re reading right now began life as an experiment in using that very feature). For those times when you want to blog about other stuff you find online, Flock appears to have some incredibly useful features.

So check it out… if you’re a serious blogger, Flock looks like a very interesting alternative!

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Blogged with Flock

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Understanding Flatness

friedman.jpgI’ve been reading Thomas Friedman’s book “The World Is Flat” and have been finding it a compelling and interesting read. I think he has really clearly identified and explained the trends and convergences that have brought us to what is arguably one of the most important inflexion points in world history.

If you get a chance to read the book I suggest you do so. In the meantime, you might like to have a look at this video (http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/264/) of Friedman giving a speech to a group of students and staff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this talk he gives an excellent overview of the book and explains some of its key ideas. The speech lasts about 75 minutes in total and its the sort of thing you need to really sit and watch in its entirety, but well worth it. Maybe watch it instead of TV one night…

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Living on the Long Tail

One of the interesting concepts I’ve read about is The Long Tail. It’s a phenomonon I’d noticed and had kinda thought about but had never really heard it explained in such an obvious way. The term was coined by Chris Anderson from Wired magazine.

One of the interpretations of the Long Tail basically refers to the notion that if lots of people are able to publish content to a small specialised audience that is so niche and so targeted then the collective sum of all these small publications will start to eat into the audience share of the mainstream media publications.

If you map this phenomenon as a graph of the popularity of various publications versus the number of actual publications, then the graph looks like the diagram here… a chart that has a small number of publications with relatively high levels of popularity on the left, and a large number of publications with low levels of popularity as you move to the left… giving the shape of the “long tail”.

It’s occurred to me lately just how much I’ve been living on this “long tail”. I hardly watch mainstream TV or listen to mainstream radio anymore… I listen to lots more podcasts now than live radio, because I get to listen to what I want to listen to, when I want to listen to it, and don’t have to rely on the mass media who really has no idea about what I’m interested in. Same with blogs… I read blogs regularly and rarely read mainstream newspapers, so I’m really feeling the effect of the long tail. Every minute I spend watching YouTube, listening to podcasts, reading blogs, is one more minute that I’m not giving to the major networks. And as more and more people move away from the mainstream media for the information that interests and entertains them, this notion of the long tail is having a huge influence on the economics of the way we have traditionally consumed media.

Take this snippet from the New York TV website for example…

For years, networks have trembled at the idea of selling individual episodes because it fundamentally undermines the way TV works—or used to work. But after the success of ABC’s bold toe-in-the-pool partnership with iTunes, NBC and CBS last week announced plans to sell their own shows through video-on-demand services for 99 cents an episode. And suddenly it’s not so hard to envision a future (by which I mean two years, not twenty) in which you buy most of your TV shows the way you do, say, magazines – subscribing to some, picking and choosing others. At which point there’s no more need to stick to the half-hour/hour-long model on TV than there is for magazines to publish each issue at precisely 100 or 200 pages.

There are plenty of other implications of the Long Tail. It’s a classic example of the way the web has democratised the world we once knew, changing many of the old rules forever. There are now millions of people sharing their ideas, having a voice, expressing opinions and putting their thoughts “out there” for anyone to pick up on.

The thing that many folk find somewhat hard to understand is that there are people out there who do pick up on this stuff. It seems that no matter how specialised or offbeat your interests are, the web is enabling people with similar interests to get together. It’s creating a whole new breed of media publishers – bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, Flickr sharers, etc – who can now have a voice, no matter how small, and are still finding an audience that is interested to hear what they have to say. The vast majority of this “publishing” would be totally economically unviable under the old mass media model, but are now totally feasible thanks to the web.

It’s no wonder the big media networks are getting nervous about losing their audience. They ought to be. The long tail is only going to get longer.