Browsers, as user interfaces, suck

Unfortunately, a lot of programmers I know seem to disagree. “Everyone knows how to use a browser,” they say.

I thought I’d bring up a couple of counter-points in the hopes of enlightening my otherwise-often-right friends.

Alan Cooper: Lose the Browser!

Here’s what Alan Cooper (a.k.a. “The Father of Visual Basic”) had to say about browsers in InfoWorld:

“My advice to Microsoft is to abandon the browser. The browser is a red herring; it’s a dead end. The idea of having batched processing inside a very stupid program that’s controlled remotely is a software architecture that was invented about 25 years ago by IBM, and was abandoned about 20 years ago because it’s a bad architecture. We’ve gone tremendously retrograde by bringing in Web browsers… We have stepped backward in terms of user interface, capability, and the breadth of our thinking about what we could do as a civilization. The browser is a very weak and stupid program because it was written as essentially a master’s thesis inside a university and as an experiment….”

He’s right, you know…

Recommended Reading

Beyond the Browser A piece by Bruce Tognazzini on how the browser has been crippling the software industry as far as human-computer interaction goes.

First Principles by Bruce Tognazzini. If you’re designing user interfaces, make sure you know all about the terms and ideas listed in this piece.