Personally, I don't enjoy using web browsers much, either for "documents" or apps. There's a lot of good stuff out there made with hard work by talented people, but when it comes to my own personal computing, I would much rather use other kinds of interaction.
99% of my internet life consists of a few homogenous styles of interaction: browsing pseudo-hierarchical directories; communicating via text; purchasing; looking at pictures and movies; etc. In a hypothetical cyber-utopia or something, this could all just be a simple protocol (say, um, combining aspects of Direct Connect, BitTorrent, NNTP, Gopher, Bitcoin, GPG) that I could use with my own client, which would probably be an Emacs interface. Instead we live in a world where the web standards seem to encourage teams to spend their energy on reimplementing drop-down widgets.
It's wasteful and doesn't even lead to particularly good user interfaces. How many sites or web apps work well (actually well, not just semi-tolerably) with keyboard navigation? How much bandwidth and CPU goes to waste? How many sites work passably offline? How easy is it to automate tasks as a user? How easy is it to learn how to make your own sites?
I think "browsers" should be something very different from what they are today, and maybe something new will come along in the near future.
99% of my internet life consists of a few homogenous styles of interaction: browsing pseudo-hierarchical directories; communicating via text; purchasing; looking at pictures and movies; etc. In a hypothetical cyber-utopia or something, this could all just be a simple protocol (say, um, combining aspects of Direct Connect, BitTorrent, NNTP, Gopher, Bitcoin, GPG) that I could use with my own client, which would probably be an Emacs interface. Instead we live in a world where the web standards seem to encourage teams to spend their energy on reimplementing drop-down widgets.
It's wasteful and doesn't even lead to particularly good user interfaces. How many sites or web apps work well (actually well, not just semi-tolerably) with keyboard navigation? How much bandwidth and CPU goes to waste? How many sites work passably offline? How easy is it to automate tasks as a user? How easy is it to learn how to make your own sites?
I think "browsers" should be something very different from what they are today, and maybe something new will come along in the near future.