Future of Search

Today, the human experience of the Net stands at a crossroad, paths diverging into the future, and nobody knows which one we’ll be on in a year. There are many options: Safari is good, Opera is good, and Mozilla is good. People who go there don’t go back.

Let’s figure how will get the things when the new Internet ready portable devices or smart phones will be intensively used. These pocket size devices wit keyboards, color displays, 3G connections will soon replace laptops, because all they need are browsers that can access Web -based software as easily as the desktop can. Soon we will be able to run entire sites from the phone’s browsers.

Blake Ross, a tech prodigy, is traveling around the world to spread the word about the latest version of his creation, the Web browser Firefox. Asked how the Firefox crew intends to respond to a revamped Internet explorer, his answer was really fair. As Mozilla is not a traditional company, a nonprofit organization, its programmers have the incredible privilege of being able to spend every moment thinking about how to serve the users better.

The business of predicting winners is facing an unusual situation: one side isn’t even fighting. So long as there is work to be done, Mozilla’s people will do it. Tabbed browsing and better security are the major Firefox’s achievements, but there are still small obstacles. On the future of browsers, the finish line will never be reached, because as the basics get easier, people will adopt more complicated usage patterns, those themselves will need to get easier. There is already a new challenge: a more sophisticated way to group related sites together, closing groups all at once, reopening groups we had open in the past. Maybe in another five years, the current incarnation of tabbed browsing will seem as archaic as the old window model is now.

This graphic shows the growing threat which Mozilla Firefox poses to Internet Explorer from 2004 onward. By the last quarter of 2005, Internet Explorer’s usage share dropped, primary due to competition from Mozilla Firefox. An important factor have been the increasing use of various distributions of the Linux operating system, many of which include Firefox as the default browser; the relative similarity in layout between the two competitor browsers’ design is making the transition easier; the lack of tabbed browsing as a feature in most Internet Explorer versions was another factor too. The real fact is that users who convert to using Firefox often choose not to revert to Internet Explorer, and use it only to access Microsoft sites.

But almost every Web designer find hard sometimes to distinguish himself among the sea of Web developers out there. One ay that developers can make a mark for themselves is to know about old and new technology. When someone possesses this type of knowledge, clients will see him as a much more wee-rounded developer who can make good recommendations about the best technology for a particular project. Being familiar with newest Web technologies can make the developer more appealing to clients.