How many browsers do you need?
There are some interesting trends starting to converge, I think. First of all, a truly mind-boggling (at least to me) number of S60 devices are streaming out into the world. Second, the notion that mobile devices are all about the Internet is (finally) starting to pervade upper levels of corporate decision-making. The third one is not particularly visible yet, but it makes so much sense that it’s probably there, just hasn’t yet emerged. The third thing is the proliferation of more S60 development projects, particularly open-source ones. Now, there are different opinions about how many third-party software choices you might want or need, but I’m really just interested in one category: browsers.
I think the convergence of these three things is going to lead to more choice in the S60 browser world, which seems like it should be one of those “inevitable” things. We’re already in the tens of millions of users, and at NokiaWorld Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo talked about bringing the Internet to “the next billion users.” S60 isn’t Nokia, of course, but at the moment Nokia is selling the lion’s share of S60 devices. In any case, there are a lot of S60s.
With such a huge population of users, it stands to reason that they’ll have different needs and wants for browsing. There’s plenty of room for a wider variety of browsing applications. There’s also plenty of room for a wider variety of variations of our browser.
I think there’s a good chance we’ll see specialty browsers in S60. Given enough memory space, you might want browser tailored to your own uses. Rather than a set of bookmarks, for example, why not a Sports Browser? A Music Browser? A Financial Browser? All of these would use the same Internet, but they’d deliver a UI and content tailored to a particular set of use cases.
All of this is already possible, of course, and on desktop systems takes a slightly different form: take a “basic” browser (say, Firefox) and add plugins and skins. On mobile devices it might go a different way: different applications. Or different varieties of the same application, of course. When storage is no longer a problem, why not?
The web as a platform, of course that’s going to happen mate. You can call them specialty browsers, but I’ll just stick to calling them web based applications. About the only thing I use today that doesn’t connect to the net is notepad and calculator.
Here is an idea: Mozilla is working on XUL, Nokia is working on WPF, shouldn’t you guys be working on something that would make it easier for developers to build a mobile application that access the internets?