{"id":645011,"date":"2013-03-03T13:30:57","date_gmt":"2013-03-03T18:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=615480"},"modified":"2013-03-03T13:30:57","modified_gmt":"2013-03-03T18:30:57","slug":"browsing-the-web-on-an-ipad-stinks-and-apple-likes-it-that-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/645011","title":{"rendered":"Browsing the web on an iPad stinks\u2013and Apple likes it that way"},"content":{"rendered":"

When iPads were first introduced in 2010, an Apple\u00a0press release<\/a>\u00a0promised that the “iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch interface makes surfing the web an entirely new experience, dramatically more interactive and intimate than on a computer.”\u00a0The implication was that the web via the tablet would be unrecognizable and vastly superior: hoverboarding compared with surfing on my laptop and doggie paddling on my phone.<\/p>\n

Yet, here it is three years on, and we\u2019re still waiting for that “interactive and intimate” browsing experience (and hoverboards, for that matter).<\/p>\n

A recent\u00a0study conducted by Onswipe<\/a>\u00a0revealed that iPads account for a whopping 98.1 percent of tablet traffic on websites. Despite this, the actual experience of surfing the web on an iPad is underwhelming at best and infuriating at worst. Simply put, today’s state-of-the-art tablet browsers, especially Safari, don\u2019t do the Internet, the user, or the iPad justice. Apple wasn’t totally wrong: The iPad has proven itself to be a revolutionary device that absolutely has the potential to offer a transformative web-browsing experience. It just hasn’t yet. Which means there’s a gap in the market for an intuitive, immersive, innovative iPad browser. Whoever develops it is going to win big.<\/p>\n

Safari is deliberately hobbled<\/h2>\n

As more and more of the services we use on a daily basis have migrated to the cloud, the web browser has become the computer’s most essential app. And when we surf the web on a computer, we encounter few obstacles. Though we may have to scale the occasional paywall or sit through an obligatory five seconds of an ad before accessing content,\u00a0the navigational experience of a computer user is fluid and frictionless — as anyone who\u2019s gone down the rabbit hole researching alpaca breeds\u00a0<\/b>or underrated Val Kilmer films at 3 a.m. can attest.<\/p>\n

Surfing the web is far less pleasurable on an iPad. Visiting a site frequently presents one with a pop-up and a dilemma: Download the app, or endure the diminished experience of a website designed for another device. Safari is essentially a limited version of its desktop sibling \u2013 and apps almost always provide a better experience. (Or, as Firefox UX Lead Alex Limi\u00a0has summed it up<\/a>, it’s\u00a0”kind of sucky.”)<\/p>\n

Of course, this is sort of the point. It’s in Apple’s, or any tablet maker’s, best interest to make using (read: buying) apps preferable to visiting websites. Safari is designed to make using web-based apps on an iPad inconvenient<\/em>, if not impossible.\u00a0In response, most companies focus their mobile development resources on creating native apps rather than optimizing their content for tablet browsers. The result is a browsing experience full of flow-breakers. In\u00a0short, on a computer the browsing experience is limitless; on a tablet, it’s filled with blind alleys and false doors.<\/p>\n

Why web browsing still matters<\/h2>\n

There is an impulse among some to assume that the rise of apps \u2013 or, more sensationally, the death of the website \u2013 will eventually render browsers, or at least mobile ones, obsolete.\u00a0While it’s true that more and more content is consumed through apps, and that\u00a0personalization has shifted our approach<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>to content from searching to getting, the\u00a0average number of Google searches<\/a>\u00a0per day has steadily increased \u2013 by an astounding one trillion each year.<\/p>\n

But even if we accept that the importance of mobile websites is on the wane, there\u2019s no reason for mobile browsers to beat them to an early grave. There is plenty of room for resurrection, but only if we throw out desktop-based notions of what a browser looks and feels like. Freed of all the tasks and\u00a0responsibilities that other apps accomplish, tablet browsers should<\/em> offer an absorbing, engaging innovative experience. Further, they should evolve the idea of what a browser is and can be on a tablet. Take GarageBand, for example: The iPad version is infinitely more interactive and tactile than the desktop version.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve mostly been picking on Safari. As the native browser for a tablet that accounts for 98.1 percent of tablet traffic, its influence is enormous. However, that’s not to say there aren\u2019t more innovative browsers taking steps in the right direction.\u00a0Dolphin<\/a>, for instance, allows you to create your own gestures for various functions.\u00a0And though there are any number of other browsers contending in the space, as of yet none has emerged as the standard-setter or must-have. Mozilla\u2019s forthcoming iPad browser,\u00a0Junior<\/a>, which completely throws out desktop-inspired design and focuses on simplicity, could be a contender, but for now we have to wait and see.<\/p>\n

What we’ve lost<\/h2>\n

As it currently stands, the shoehorning of hobbled desktop browsers onto tablets is forcing us to move from a browser to app-navigation experience. This is not necessarily a negative development, but we must carefully consider what we lose as our web experience becomes siloed, or, alternately, take into consideration in our app design how we can ensure and better enable the type of surfing serendipity that made web browsing valuable in the first place.<\/p>\n

The web as we have known it was designed to facilitate the browsing experience \u2013 to be a boundlessly linked rhizomatic structure of hypertext. But we have quite willingly begun to fence it off as we have shifted our experience to the iPad and individual apps.\u00a0Even worse, though, is that most of the apps and services that have attempted to fill the browsing void have only further constricted the experience of the web via the tablet.<\/p>\n

Under the claim of “personalization” and making the browsing and discovery experience more individually valuable and meaningful, they really provide little more than constricting customization confined to picks of an editor or your social graph. Most of it is expected or retreaded.What is lost is the magic of blazing a trail from one page to the next, the anticipation of revealing the unknown that lurks behind the next link. Personalization shouldn’t be an either\/or experience of web discovery, and neither should browsing on the tablet.<\/p>\n

While we will continue to make strides in personalizing the web, and hopefully even enhancing the web experience on tablets, I\u2019m also looking forward to a browser that lets me fall down an unexpected rabbit hole once in awhile. As long as there are alpacas and Val Kilmer movies, there will be surfers. It’s up to developers to provide the hoverboards.<\/p>\n

<\/em>Hank Nothhaft is the co-founder and chief product officer of<\/em>\u00a0<\/i>Trapit<\/a><\/em>, a personalized content discovery platform.<\/em><\/p>\n

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