I hear people say we are heading for a new browser war. Maybe. It’s important because the browser is our first port of call with the external world, the tool we use to encounter the network of networks. There could hardly be a more important piece of software.
Firefox though is over-rated and a clumsy tool in my view. I’ve been a Firefox user and dumped it. I think a lot of its kudos comes from being a Mozilla project but that’s not good enough.
Opera I like but it is too focused on being in the old browser war – it renders fast and has a few marginal advantages over IE. Flock is the browser that could overturn our understanding of what browsers can and should do.
I say this as an IE 7 beta user. IE 7 won me over from Opera. For years I’ve used Opera so I can integrate browsing and e-mail, and because I like to have my web sessions automatically saved for me. My time on the web (searching, browsing and communicating) was adequately served. Why I came back to IE is I learned how to use Outlook and once I’d done that I found it more important to integrate my desire to be better organised with my communications with that outside world. IE was in some ways the afterthought, having switched my e-mail from Opera to Outlook but an after thought with traction.
IE 7 displays some typical Microsoft elements. And this goes for Outlook too. IE has some interesting knowledge organising features. For example with tabbed widnows it is possible to set up multiple home pages, meaning of course that when you fire up IE 7 you can have available to you every home page you regularly visit. The problem is you don’t know this, just like you don’t know all the great things you can do with Outlook. Microsoft should be telling us more of what we can do, in ways that tempt us to make use of those features.
Flock is the broswer for Web 2 and the IE 7 team should be looking closely at what Flock are doing. With Flock I can organise my photos, create my own news page, blog direct from the website I might be visiting (great blog this! feature), and clip from websites and store bits of data. This is a browser for people who want to communicate in a variety of ways.
No browser yet has managed to fulfil my ultimate desire which is to allow the development of knowledge communities. I tried this with my own browser design five years back, assisted by an IE developer in fact. It is still a feature missing from every browser out there. Right now though Flock comes closest. Microsoft needs to think about leaping Flock. There’s no point playing catch up.
