The article from Wired.com Magazine, “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet”, is about the emergence of applications on wireless devices such as iPhones and Android phones as well as on Blu-Ray players and home gaming systems. The article claims that applications are taking over how we use the Internet. It says that instead of the traditional way of “surfing the web” using a web browser, people are using applications such as “Facebook”, “Twitter”, “Netflix”, and “The New York Times” to receive information. Wired.com writers back up their claim with numbers.
Chris Anderson writes, “Today the content you see in your browser — largely HTML data delivered via the http protocol on port 80 — accounts for less than a quarter of the traffic on the Internet.” But you could argue against this because the amount of data transferred by NetFlix, YouTube, Pandora, etc. is much greater than what’s transferred when you view a normal webpage.
Michael Wolff backs him with a study comparing the most used websites (which are most likely to have their own applications) to every other website saying, “According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US page views in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010.”
This trend seems to show that people are leaning towards using applications to get most of their information. As an iPhone user, I can say that if other people are like me I definitely prefer using certain apps for getting content from the internet. Browsing in Safari on my iPhone can sometimes be cumbersome because most web pages are designed to be viewed on a larger screen. Although this is a major downfall, there are many things I dislike about applications. The information you can get from a single app is extremely limited, also the things you can do in these applications are limited.
ReadWriteWeb.com has an article claiming that browsing is not dead just migrating to a different format called Mobile Touch Websites (see http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mobile_app_or_browser-based_site.php). When browsing on your mobile device, if you go to a major corporation’s website, most likely you will be redirected to a mobile version of their site. This version offers mobile users easier navigation and viewing on their mobile device. The number of Mobile Touch Websites has skyrocketed in the last two years. Richard MacManus writes, “Taptu estimates that there are 326,000 Mobile Touch Web sites worldwide, which they say compares to 148,000 iPhone apps in the App Store and 24,000 apps in the Android market. Taptu expects the browser-based mobile web market to grow much faster than the app market.”
Okay I admit I mostly use apps when I’m on the move and need to check my bank account, to watch a video on YouTube, to stream music from Pandora, or basically anything that I routinely do. When I’m trying to find information on anything out of the ordinary, whether at home or on the go, I use a browser because it’s the fastest way to get what I’m looking for. Browsers have been the prevalent way to access information on the Internet since it’s conception. I doubt they will die as Wired.com’s article suggests. Rather how browsers are used will likely change to accommodate the boom in users now browsing the internet from their mobile devices.
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