The Internet appears to be moving away from the browser experience of the past two decades and towards more inclusive, multi-faceted apps. Like so many things, the web browser now faces competition from more than just other web browsers – it must contend with content- and feature-rich apps that also happen to serve as web browsers.
Earlier this week, I posted that 6% of iPad web browsing was done in apps. What I hadn’t checked out yet was what they were browsing on – a ‘true’ 3rd-party app, or an alternative web browser like Opera or iLunascape. After breaking down a full range of iOS devices, I found that of the nearly 7% of browsing that was done outside of Safari, only 0.13% was another browser.
The best example of an app that is gunning for web browsers, and the one I cited in my article on iPad browsing, is the newly-launched Bing app. It’s not a browser, but rather a branded experience built around the Bing “decision engine.” Yes, it browses the Internet, but compared with mobile Safari it feels more like an Internet experience, not just a single-task web interpreter.
What appears to be happening to browsers is the opposite of what happened to search engines almost a decade ago. Traditional search powerhouses were portals – in theory, everything you wanted in one place. Google implemented their famously minimalistic just-serve-the-results interface, and the experience of the Internet was largely taken out of the hands of the portals.
Perhaps it’s time for portals to return. Bing continues to gain market share, and Yahoo! continues to hold steady, in large part because they present users with more functionality. AOL – sorry, Aol – continues to snork up content sites (TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc.) with this theory in mind. Perhaps the next revolution is browsers becoming less like Google and more like Yahoo!
In the meantime, as the app mentality continues to spread (it reached desktops when Apple launched the Mac Store, and Microsoft is rumored to have a Windows App Store in the works), traditional, one-trick ponies may well see their usage decline as feature-rich experiences become better and more common.
1 comment