I noticed the other week that the majority of applications I regularly run on my computer are browsers, or apps that pretend not to be browsers, but actually are mostly made of browser.
Let's make a list:
What else do I run most days? Yorufukurou for Twitter (again, kept out of Safari to avoid cookie clutter), Clear for my todo lists, and a text editor (either BBEdit or Textastic, depending on the task).
What's changed? A few years ago it was all the other way round: email was local, work was local, music was certainly all local. Chat was in IRC.
Specific things that have changed are:
I'm still in love with the URL. A URL is a powerful thing. The "L" stands for "locator", and it's not hard to make short, simple, human-readable, hackable URLs for anything and everything you might wish to post online. I have no interest in "sharing" "content". My website isn't made of "content", it's made of words and pictures that I've created myself.
Sorry, got carried away by that tangent. Still, I feel strongly about it. That's why my website is hand-made and I feel good about it being so.
Back to the point about browsers: it's inevitable, if you think about it. As more of everyday life ends up made of internet, so more of computing ends up made of browsers. It's simply a reflection of where we are, how far we've come, and the events that have got us here.
Filed under: computers
(5th November 2014)