Life Inside the Browser
It feels like almost everything I do on my computer these days is inside my “web browser”:http://www.getfirefox.com. I use “Gmail”:http://gmail.google.com for email, I basically use “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com as my bookmark manager, I get all my news from the web, and I’m writing this inside my browser right now. When I need to write myself a little note, I send myself an email. When I find a link I want to save, I post it to this site. Which brings up the question: what _don’t_ I do inside the browser? Or better yet, what’s keeping me from having a completely portable electronic life?
If everything I did on a computer happened inside the browser, I could sit down at any computer with internet in the world and have my entire computing environment available to me. I could use any operating system, because it wouldn’t matter which one I used. And I could, potentially, use a computer or device that was nothing but a web browser, a so-called internet appliance that a few companies tried 3 or 4 years ago but never caught on because, well, you need more than a browser.
What’s stopping me? Basically 3 things: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and digital pictures. Dreamweaver and Photoshop are for work, and although it would certainly be possible to have a powerful in-browser HTML editor, I don’t think one is going to come along soon that could replace Dreamweaver. I use Photoshop mostly for working with colors and for fine-tuning small images for the web, so I don’t think it’s going away either. Looks like those two are staying around, at least at work.
Digital photos are probably the biggest barrier to my dream of an all-internet computing existence. I have to put photos on my hard drive, and to get them anywhere else, like an email attachment or a website, they have to start on my hard drive and I have to upload them one at a time. I use “iPhoto”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/ on my Mac, and I occasionally use “Picasa”:http://www.picasa.com on my work PC, and even though those two applications are great, they tie me down to one computer and one hard drive.
How close could I come to the all-browser solution? Pretty close. Imagine that Rich Internet Applications come through for me for everything: HTML editing, photo editing, note-taking, calendar, etc. (I don’t use Office much). Applications aren’t the problem. It’s files. The main difference between what a browser application can do and what a desktop application can do is that the desktop application can do whatever it wants with files on my hard drive. Obviously, settings and preferences aren’t the problem, because those get stored on a server when you have an internet app. It’s the bigger things, like my resume and all my digital photos, that don’t communicate well with my browser and have to be stored on my hard drive. Okay, so I store my files on the server of the service I’m going to use them with. That makes sense, and it’s perfectly consistent with the way most internet apps work today, but it’s not flexible. What if I need to take a picture and send it to a different service to print it? Or what if I want to post my resume to lots of different services? I need the ultimate flexible storage solution. I need an internet drive that makes my files available to whatever service I need them to be available to. When I need to attach a file to an email, I need to be able to browse to it on my internet drive and select it. When I download a file, I need to download it to my personal internet drive. With a personal FTP site, this is almost possible. If I can manage to mount my FTP site as a drive, I can click upload and browse to that drive. But it’s not always ideal, and not possible to mount an FTP server (mine ends up read-only on my Mac, which is lame).
The last hurdle? Getting pictures from my digital camera straight to the internet. Browsers don’t interface with hard drives very well. Maybe the solution to that will be a 3 megapixel camera on my cell phone that automatically uploads pictures I take over a super-fast wireless network to my internet storage. Now that would be portability.
