(2023-10-27) Berjon Youre Gonna Need A Bigger Browser

Robin Berjon: You're Gonna Need A Bigger Browser. If we're agreed that the Web is for user agency, then in order to figure out where the Web goes next we should probably spend some time looking at user agents a.k.a. web browsers.

our idea of what a browser is and does for us hasn't moved much in a long time and if we intend to work towards greater user agency it seems plausible that we should at the very least be open to considering a major overhaul of what a Web user agent looks like.

First: are we right to think of the browser as a standalone product?

The architectural view in which search, social, and browsing are distinct is a distraction that does not map to the experienced reality of most people. (Maybe most people are Consumers.)

we should lean into our users' experience and consider browsers moving up the application stack as agents, eating up search and social as protocols.

Technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate. But the product view beats the architectural view every time.

Chrome increasingly looks like the in-app browser for the Google universe and it's easy to imagine a future in which it is just replaced by the Google app and the people who keep using an actual browser will just be a small bunch of harmless weirdoes that can be safely ignored.

right now we're seeing search commoditise browsers because that's where the money is coming from

We should commoditise search and social instead, and make them serve user agency in ways that they currently refuse to.

Second question: should the user agent just be a user client?

Apart from a number security protections, the agent side of the Web is, let's be blunt, profoundly dumb from the user's perspective. Browsers as pure clients is an architecture that creates an asymmetry of automation that makes authors more powerful than users; it needs to be reversed.

I will dive more deeply into what a Personal Data Server (PDS) architecture could do in a future post, but one way to thinking about a transition to an agent that's more than a pure protocol client is to imagine the user agent as a perimeter formed by software on a coordinated (by standards) set of user devices. (Personal Cloud)

There is any number of typical features that would work better if they were in people's hands: recommendations, search & social filters, content and people blocking, identity, comments, shopping cart management, subscription & membership management. All of these would strongly benefit from from an agent eating up the stack with a form of server component

Settle Your Tabs

Tabs are bad for apps. No one wants to run an app in a tab. No one at all. Putting applicative content inside of a document interface is such a dumb idea they wouldn't even have it on MTV Pimp My Ride. It's terrible for composability, if you worked on the issues involved in making Web pages composable (tackled in a coming post) the tab UI would still stand in the way.

Think About The Business Model

by and large the business model for browsers is selling the search engine default. There's very real money in browsers and yet they're free

Brian Kardell (and others) estimates the cost of maintaining all browser engines is in the range of $2bn.

Just looking at the two top browsers we've found a 90+% profit margin being extracted out of the Web and put elsewhere and something like 28+17= $45bn that could go to funding Web projects but that instead pays for unrelated Google/Apple products.

To conclude, the core problem isn't that browsers are bad — it's more that browsers are not browser enough.