Teasers: Browsers Become Clients
March 1997
Teasers: Snippets we write ourselves about items we plan to write about more fully in the next few issues. Think about it as our early thinking about the industry buzz.
Browsers Become Clients?
We already know that the day of the browser as an access and display mechanism for getting to the World Wide Web, exciting as it was, is flashing to its showy close. That’s not because the WWW is going away; if anything, it’s growing so fast that it’s hard to track just where (and why) it’s going. Rather, this is about expanding the notion of a browser to include the user’s whole computing environment. I was going to say desktop, but since we’re also talking about laptop computers, NC’s, Web TV’s, and handhelds, that somehow seems less apt.
With Communicator (and even more strongly with its follow-on, Constellation), Netscape moves forward from selling browsers to selling clients or desktop environments or whatever we’re going to call them. Vendors like Lotus love to think of them as clients, since it points to the fact that Lotus was right all along in believing that a browser would never be enough and that the robust, more fully featured client would eventually carry the day. These new "clients," of course, may be a little different than an application client like Notes/Domino (although, certainly, thousands, maybe millions of Notes users live inside their application interface), in that they will sit on top of and provide access to multiple applications and environments.
Netscape will certainly not be alone. Microsoft will soon be showing its Internet Explorer 4.0 which is, again, more like a client than a browser. Of course, at some point in the future, Microsoft has been suggesting that you won’t need a separate browser/client at all, since all that will be part of a future universally used Microsoft operating system. We’ll see.
Don’t expect other vendors to take this sitting down. We’re about to see a thousand client/browser-plus/whatever flowers bloom. Count on it.
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Entire contents © 1997 by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.