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Browsers aren't real tools. They are designed to make for smooth information consumption Well yeah. They're browsers, that's what they are. "To browse: an act

by steve1977 8y ago

Browsers aren't real tools. They are designed to make for smooth information consumption Well yeah. They're browsers, that's what they are. "To browse: an act of casual looking or reading."

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
They're not really browsers - they're web page viewers. The views are organised by the needs of the source technology - "pages" generated by a web server - not by the needs of the user. A lot of useful features - cross-referencing, comparisons, task-based content searches, dynamic content update notifications - are either impossible or poorly implemented on the server side. There's never been an active browser that tries to integrate information instead of being a dumb page viewer with tabs and some form filling options.
- TuringTest 8y ago
  To be fair, every time someone tries to advance in the way of an integrated information tool, it gets a lot of backlash at tech sites from people saying that "a browser should be a browser and just show me the pages, nothing else". Not that everybody feels that way, but those people get vocal.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  Early on, the Web was imagined to have a plethora of "agents" (bots) which act on behalf of their users, extracting information from pages, following links, aggregating the relevant data, etc. This worked really well for search engines, but certain economic incentives crept in which pretty much killed off this idea. In particular: - Many sites gained revenue by advertising - Advertising only really works if a human is viewing it (it's possible to integrate advertising into the data, with product placement, "native advertising", etc. but that's more expensive than slapping some Javascript in some iframes) - Exposing data publically in easily parsed formats will mostly stop humans from viewing the page. Hence so much data is now in silos. - Exposing services, like search, to bots can get expensive. Hence the rise of API keys. There are other reasons too, like scraping being hard and fragile due to styling having too much influence over markup (CSS helped a little; a more radical attempt was sending raw XML and creating the page via XSLT). The rise of Javascript-only sites, and the difficulty of implementing all of the many JS APIs that a site might try to use, has also hindered alternative user agents. The end result is the Web being dominated by a handful of user agents: a few search crawlers and a few user-facing browsers :(
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > A lot of useful features - cross-referencing, comparisons, task-based content searches, dynamic content update notifications - are either impossible or poorly implemented on the server side. Dynamic content update notification is a solved problem - how many sites ask you daily to enable notifications? It's an issue of will, not way. As for others - those are really client-side concerns, they should be implemented in the user agent (i.e. browser). > There's never been an active browser that tries to integrate information instead of being a dumb page viewer with tabs and some form filling options. Agreed there never have been (to my knowledge) an active browser that's fully suitable for knowledge work. That said, the few features there were supporting, to paraphrase Pólya, the intelligent reader, have over time been diminished or removed from the browsers. For instance, both RSS feeds and user-styling used to be first-class features of browsers; both are now either invisible or gone.
TuringTest 8y ago
Then we need to create the category of builders as the base tool for web work, and relegate browsers to a secondary role.

Browsers aren't real tools. They are designed to make for smooth information consumption Well yeah. They're browsers, that's what they are. "To browse: an act of casual looking or reading."

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

They're not really browsers - they're web page viewers. The views are organised by the needs of the source technology - "pages" generated by a web server - not by the needs of the user. A lot of useful features - cross-referencing, comparisons, task-based content searches, dynamic content update notifications - are either impossible or poorly implemented on the server side. There's never been an active browser that tries to integrate information instead of being a dumb page viewer with tabs and some form filling options.

TuringTest 8y ago
To be fair, every time someone tries to advance in the way of an integrated information tool, it gets a lot of backlash at tech sites from people saying that "a browser should be a browser and just show me the pages, nothing else". Not that everybody feels that way, but those people get vocal.
chriswarbo 8y ago
Early on, the Web was imagined to have a plethora of "agents" (bots) which act on behalf of their users, extracting information from pages, following links, aggregating the relevant data, etc. This worked really well for search engines, but certain economic incentives crept in which pretty much killed off this idea. In particular: - Many sites gained revenue by advertising - Advertising only really works if a human is viewing it (it's possible to integrate advertising into the data, with product placement, "native advertising", etc. but that's more expensive than slapping some Javascript in some iframes) - Exposing data publically in easily parsed formats will mostly stop humans from viewing the page. Hence so much data is now in silos. - Exposing services, like search, to bots can get expensive. Hence the rise of API keys. There are other reasons too, like scraping being hard and fragile due to styling having too much influence over markup (CSS helped a little; a more radical attempt was sending raw XML and creating the page via XSLT). The rise of Javascript-only sites, and the difficulty of implementing all of the many JS APIs that a site might try to use, has also hindered alternative user agents. The end result is the Web being dominated by a handful of user agents: a few search crawlers and a few user-facing browsers :(
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> A lot of useful features - cross-referencing, comparisons, task-based content searches, dynamic content update notifications - are either impossible or poorly implemented on the server side. Dynamic content update notification is a solved problem - how many sites ask you daily to enable notifications? It's an issue of will, not way. As for others - those are really client-side concerns, they should be implemented in the user agent (i.e. browser). > There's never been an active browser that tries to integrate information instead of being a dumb page viewer with tabs and some form filling options. Agreed there never have been (to my knowledge) an active browser that's fully suitable for knowledge work. That said, the few features there were supporting, to paraphrase Pólya, the intelligent reader, have over time been diminished or removed from the browsers. For instance, both RSS feeds and user-styling used to be first-class features of browsers; both are now either invisible or gone.

TuringTest 8y ago

Then we need to create the category of builders as the base tool for web work, and relegate browsers to a secondary role.