Why do dollar signs appear on my desktop?

analysis of the problems with todays web browsers tocasual users, business users

• At the risk of repeating an old saw, when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Our hammer has been the Web browser. It has been crippling the software industry for the past eight years and it will kill productivity at any company that introduces major enterprise applications on its intranet. Should we get rid of the browser? No, no more than we should get rid of the hammer. The browser is a useful tool. It needs to cease being the only tool, and it could use some improvement. Problems With Today's Browsers Surprise! IE6 Takes Browser Lead The first networks that were the foundation of the Internet went online in the late 1960s. For the next 25 years, the Internet remained the exclusive province of technocrats. The browser changed all that, giving real people unprecedented access to information. The Web browser has one big advantage: The basic functionality needed to read an article is fairly easy to use, and even novice users can view content from across the world in a reasonably nice layout. That's it for the benefits. Browsers fail to support the actual task of browsing the Web. Netscape Navigator does not have many navigation features, and Internet Explorer does not help users explore new information spaces. Page viewing is truly all they excel at. Movement between pages and the ability to understand where you have been and where you can go? Forget about it. Within months, the browser was running out of steam, and programmers struggled to get beyond the confines of HTML, designed purely to display fixed text and graphics pages. The answer was JavaScript, a huge kludge that accelerated the move to two-way communication within Web pages. Java Script should be considered a kludge because its syntax is often antithetical to HTML, and because JavaScript was designed to be hidden within HTML comments, so the HTML wouldn't know it was there. Kludge, kludge, kludge. From the programmer's point of view, it was expedient. Unfortunately, it had the side effect of stopping everyone who wasn't a programmer dead in his or her tracks. No one but the priesthood could develop advanced Web pages. Eventually, a new standard for dynamic HTML promised to give back some of the power wrested away by the programmers, but infighting among the browser publishers has continued to hold back its implementation. Because the browser's capabilities were, for all practical purposes, frozen four years ago, the browser has failed utterly in its attempts to keep up with the increasing demands of Web users. How bad are these failings? Many basic capabilities that we took for granted on microcomputers in the late 1970s remain absent from today's browser technology. "Weblications," applications designed to be used under browsers, may run hundreds of times more slowly than the same types of applications on a 1978 Apple II. Can anything be done about it? Yes — as long as you control the browser environment in which your users will run your weblications. Given such total control, developers can make use of third-party plug-ins that work around the problems. Lacking that control, developers must continue to turn out software no one would have dared release in the 1970s. Why do we keep using the browser if it is so bad? It is the only game in town — the only way ordinary people can access the wonders of the Web. For all its failings, it is still far better than nothing, and nothing is the only alternative. What went wrong? Microsoft. By forcing Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems out of the market, it eliminated the competition. As a result, all competitive pressure to fix the problem has been eliminated. (Just think: If Microsoft had as effectively stymied Apple Computer early on, we'd all still be using MS DOS.) If you are unwilling to assign all culpability to Bill Gates, we can also blame Netscape for allowing this to happen. Maybe it would have lost in any case, but several releases of the Netscape browser seemed to have no goal except increasing the bug count, allowing for more fancy page viewing and adding features that did not facilitate Web browsing. Robust code quality and features to support users' goals took the backseat, thus making it unreasonably easy for Microsoft to win. Information Broadcasting Major news stories about such topics as the Olympics and election returns jam everything up today. In the future, such information will be streamed; people will pick it up "live," as it passes by, rather than forcing each individual to stand in line at the window and beg for a plateful of information. Instead of a browser window, you'll have windows onto continuously changing data streams. Yes, it can be faked today, but using tomorrow's technology, even data-intensive streams won't bring down the Internet because everyone will tap into the same stream. Broadcasting will become a major player on the Web. Already we are seeing hundreds of radio stations take to the Net. TV stations are waiting in the wings, waiting for true high-speed, wide-bandwidth Internet connections. In the future, you will buy a set-top box that picks up cable, satellite or terrestrial signals, along with hundreds and hundreds of Internet channels. Guess what? There still won't be anything on. The beauty of it will be that by the time you discover that fact, you'll be into a new half-hour and it will be time to start looking all over again. Many of those hundreds of channels will be specialty broadcasts, with far greater variation than we see in today's biography, pet-lovers and romance-movie channels. You will have channels dedicated to stamp collectors, snake lovers and pig farmers. Just as we are seeing today, the quality of the programming will drop in inverse relationship to the number of channels available. Weblications Web applications will become indistinguishable from traditional applications. The productivity losses are stunning as long as we force complex transactions to take place in an interface for filling out forms that resembles nothing more than the IBM 3270 terminals from the 1960s. Either the browser manufacturers will begin to support Web applications properly, or someone else will supply the tools. Currently, the main argument in favor of supplying application functionality through a Web browser is that users won't have to install software on their own computers. It is true that software installation can lead to a nightmare of support problems as unexpected parts of the system stop working. Windows is so brittle that users rightly resent having to add new software to any computer that still retains most of its faculties. In the future, traditional applications will be updated seamlessly over the Web. It will be possible to get the best of both worlds: Network computing frees the user from having to act as system administrator, and personal computing dedicates a powerful system to being immediately responsive to the user's smallest whim. Why not cache application functionality on the user's local hard disk and download upgrades transparently as they are needed? Future Services Most people think browsers are the Web and the Web is the Internet. Yet these same people use a different Internet service every day: e-mail. Many of them use a completely different Internet tool as well: peer-to-peer sharing à la Napster. In the future, many more separate and distinct software and hardware tools will appear. We are already seeing Internet "radio sets" that pick up commercial-laden Internet "broadcasts." The aforementioned TV tuners will follow. Tomorrow's audio-visual receivers will likely have music-on-demand capabilities, so that you can draw from a vast library of DVD-audio-quality music, in effect sporting a multithousand-song "jukebox" in your very own living room. If Hollywood and the recording industry support such a phenomenon, they will make a fortune charging consumers a few cents per song per play. If they don't support it, the music will cost consumers even less. Movies-on-demand, the great promise of a decade ago, will finally be a reality, as long as greed doesn't get in the way. With high-speed connections, a two-hour film in high-definition TV quality will be downloaded to a local player in a few minutes. Charge 50 cents or a dollar per viewing, and people will gladly pay. Charge more, and they will watch for free, even if it isn't HDTV-quality. Books await paper-white, high-resolution, portable displays. When they arrive, the trees will finally be able to breathe easier. The so-called convergence will finally happen. Come across a neat film on your laptop and "throw it" to your TV, which will then contact a movies-on-demand supplier and show it to you. Pick up something interesting on a TV news show and "throw it" to your desktop computer, so you can dive into the story in depth. Communications The real revolution will be in communications. Live videophone will be practical for the first time. No more murky pictures and total lack of interoperability. Pictures will be life-size or bigger, and will appear in living color. Videophone, as with most new consumer technologies, will first be embraced by the sex industry, but it will quickly spread. Students and businesspeople torn from their homes will be able to remain in close and intimate contact. Work groups scattered across the globe will be able to glance into one another's offices and talk casually in a way that is difficult even when they are located in the same building. The "chat rooms" where people type at each other will be replaced by face-to-face meetings. At first, many will be disappointed by the disappearance of the anonymity of the keyboard, but soon they will take to the new medium. Most of the problems associated with chat rooms where children are concerned will be swept away as the sleazy creeps who would pretend to be young slink back into their dark corners. Enough Is Enough Web pages are not even a good metaphor for accessing information. As we have discussed, several other forms of information access are needed for the Internet to reach its potential. We also need better ways of visualizing the information space so that users don't get lost so easily. The move toward business-to-business services, extranets and complex applications delivered over the Web makes the need to go beyond the browser even more pressing. Billions of dollars are wasted every year in lost productivity as people wait for Web pages to perform duties that could have been handled better by a 1984 Macintosh-style graphical user interface application. Enough. Browsers kicked off the Web revolution, but it's time to retire them to their rightful place in the Computer Museum and get more powerful tools to support the hours of work and play we are all going to spend on the Internet every day in the future.

• Answer:

  nike222-ga, Thank you for your questions. Although you answer many of your questions yourself I have provided additional material to support or contrast with your comments. What went wrong? Microsoft. By forcing Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems out of the market, it eliminated the competition. While this is largely true, there is a small argument to be made for enhancements which Microsoft has introduced. These include suppport for ActiveX components which is truly a huge step in the direction you wish to take. ActiveX allow programmers to create RICH user interfaces much like in a traditional desktop application. The controls which they create can then be hosted in the web browser anywhere in the world. These are generally under-utilized by most web sites which don't require much interactivity, but they are much more common in corporate environments (intranets) and B2B solutions. "Exactly what are the advantages of ActiveX components? For programmers, they make developing Internet applications much simpler. Since there are literally hundreds of ready-to-use OCX's (ActiveX controls) from the Windows development environment, it is easy to carry them over to the Internet. A developer can rapidly create an application in Windows with ActiveX controls, and rather effortlessly port it over to a Web based application. As long as the end-user has an ActiveX-capable browser (Internet Explorer or Netscape with the ActiveX plug-ins), they can download the components necessary to run the Web application. The Visual Basic programming language, with its RAD (Rapid Application Development) capabilities, is seeing a surge in use as it eases the transition to ActiveX. Developers are finding a plethora of tools that allow them to quickly convert a Visual Basic application to a Web-ready application in an incredibly short amount of time. " http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/wiactive.htm IE also incorporates some technologies like XML parsing, and VML (Vector Markup Language) which allows vector graphics to be rendered directly in the browser. Unfortunately this technology is very under-utilized in my opinion. Probably due to the technical skill-set required to use it. HTML being much easy to grasp by the non-professional developer. These technologies didn't exist in Netscape when IE arrived on the scene. Vector Markup Language (VML) http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-VML Sample VML graphics: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/vml/shape/examples/t_shape.asp VML Provides XML-based Graphics for the Web http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0100/VML/VML.asp Also, in terms of marketshare, yes, Netscape is a very minor player, but in terms of users, globally 1% is a huge user base. Netscape is unlikley to completely disapper given that they were purchased by AOL, the world's larget ISP: News on the AOL/Netscape purchase: http://www.tbtf.com/resource/AOLscape.html On a side note, the popularity of Opera in other countries maybe of interest: http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox15.html -Should we get rid of the browser? No, no more than we should get rid of the hammer. The browser is a useful tool. It needs to cease being the only tool, and it could use some improvement. I agree with you. Here is a site which lists possible improvements, including: -specialized browsers -screen readers -adaptive browsers -voice browsers -other access methods (such as sending an email request for a specific page) http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/Browsing Annotations: Annotea is a project enhancing the W3C collaboration environment with shared annotations. By annotations we mean comments, notes, explanations, or other types of external remarks that can be attached to any Web document or a selected part of the document without actually needing to touch the document The current release, Amaya 7.2, supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, HTTP 1.1, MathML 2.0, many CSS 2 features, a SVG support. It's an internationalized version Project homepage is here: http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/ -How bad are these failings? Many basic capabilities that we took for granted on microcomputers in the late 1970s remain absent from today's browser technology. "Weblications," applications designed to be used under browsers, may run hundreds of times more slowly than the same types of applications on a 1978 Apple II. True, the basic capabilities are the same, but we have come a long long way in terms of ease-of-use. In 1978 the World Wide Web didn't exist. It was much more difficult to quickly find and digest or publish and share information. There was no multimedia streaming, multi-user games, video conferencing, etc etc. In other words the basic capabilities of cars haven't changed much either in a hundred years. The changes have been more subtle, but nonetheless improvements. Why not cache application functionality on the user's local hard disk and download upgrades transparently as they are needed? Very good idea! In fact hundreds of companies are now doing just that! Downing upgrades transparently is now very commonplace. Adobe products auto-update as well as Norton and McAfee anti-virus products, MS Instant messenger, Stylus Studio, Punk Buster, and many many more. There were over 20,000 result from google for a search on auto-update software: ://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22auto+update%22+software The ASP, Application Service Provider, model is based on the idea of running applications on remote servers so they never have to be installed. This too is very commonplace now. Hotmail is a good example of an application that millions of people user, but no one installs. Here are two directories of hundreds of ASPs: http://www.aspstreet.com/directory/d.taf/cid,43 http://www.asp.com/aspdirectory.html I'd like to conclude by directing you toward some very exciting research behind done to make the web a better place for all of us. Web technologies are very much a work in progress. But don't despair, many brillant minds are at work right on some very powerful ideas with will change the future of the internet in some fantastic ways: The Semantic Web is the abstract representation of data on the World Wide Web, based on the RDF standards and other standards to be defined. It is being developed by the W3C, in collaboration with a large number of researchers and industrial partners. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ "The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21 Tim Berners-Lee is the creator of the World Wide Web.