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Who should drive innovation?

One of the interesting things about Web 2.0 applications is that theres this gap that has to breach for them to be used. No matter what the application is, they are wholly reliant on a browser to access them. This is a very interesting concept and begs the question, where does the responsibility lie when it comes to innovation, with the browser vendors or with the websites?  And does the advancement, or lack thereof, limit the scope of the other?

With the recent release of new versions of the biggest players in the browser market, Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox, there has actually been very little innovation between the two.  Yes there have been improvements but watchers of the browser world weren’t too shocked by what came in.  Tabs in IE7 was a given, spellcheck in Firefox has been seen in Safari (and Firefox via a plug-in) and there wasn’t really much else to sing and dance about apart from incremental improvements here and there.  There were much vaunted RSS reader improvements in both browsers but you’d have to be a sadist to actually use them instead of a a dedicated feed reader anyway.  As far as the day to day job of browsing web pages go, its pretty much business as usual, apart from a few CSS fixes from the IE team.

So suffice to say the browser vendors haven’t really given web developers much more to work with.  At the other end of the spectrum comes the web applications, who are constantly pushing the boundaries of what HTML can do, and what browsers can render.  There have been some attempts to “push the envelope” (but feel free to substitute your own buzz word) but they haven’t been entirely successful.  Specifically because most require proprietary plugins or are system locked, such as Active X.  Few such proprietary technologies have becomes as ubiquitous as Macromedia’s (read Adobe’s) Flash, yet even that brings with it problems.  In reality, however, not many web applications require much more than what we already have.  Especially when you throw in AJAX and Flash.

What this leaves us with is an industry begging for a “push - pull” driven advancement mechanism.  The only problem at the moment is that web applications aren’t pulling and browser vendors aren’t pushing.  We’ve hit somewhat of a brick wall.  What we really need is some off the wall thinking, someone associated with either a browser vendor or a web application who can really think outside the box.  A “Wouldn’t that be cool” person who can see beyond HTML and the rendering thereof.  Unfortunately, the people who would usually be pushing the boundaries of the available technology are still somewhat transfixed with AJAX to see beyond it.  And, as good as AJAX is, I really hope its not the upper ceiling of what we can achieve on the web.

There have been some attempts to blur the boundaries between web applications and browsers, perhaps an attempt to move them forward together?  Projects such as Flock integrate Web 2.0, or social services, right into your browser.  As opposed to just the browsers view pane.

So what do you think the future of the web is?  Will the push come from Web Developers or from Browser Vendors?  And what, if anything, do we need to move the web onto the next level?

This post was written on Tuesday, October 31st 2006 by Simon T and has been categorised under Technology , Web 2.0. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg Story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.

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