Interesting Times for the Browser Usability

Last week I came across two projects that made me very excited. First I discovered Mozilla’s Prism and a few days later Fluid. For more coverage about Fluid, visit Techcruch.
Both these applications enable you to use your favourite web apps in separate, sovereign windows, kinda like IE6 does. Which is where it gets interesting. Most folks can’t seem to go without tabbed browsing after getting used to it. However, now we are actually going back in time. It seems, in retrospect, that the tab metaphor isn’t too handy for web applications. Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror also wrote an interesting piece about the tab metaphor. I too, find myself continually searching for the browser containing my gmail tab. The fact that I have more than one screen isn’t helping either.
After a day of computing I usually end up with multiple browsers on both my screens, some of them containing the same tabs. I find myself checking (or rather opening) two pages/browsers at once. This type of browsing (although not commonplace) is definitely not suited for tabbed browsers. To top it off, Exposé and the Windows taskbar isn’t showing me what tabs I have open in a browser.
So, are Prism and Fluid simply tabless browsers? Well, no, not exactly. They treat web applications like sovereign applications, clicking a link that is external will result in it opening in your browser instead of Prism. The browser chrome is also completely removed.
This solves a few usability problems. The “broken” back button is irrelevant, the issue of lost tabs is resolved. Plus accidentally closing a browser containing a tab with a draft for an essay you are writing online won’t happen anymore.
Will people start disabling tabbed browsing? I doubt it, but I definitely think that we will see a move towards more of this kind of browsing behavior, in which web applications will get a life of their own and where traditional browsing and using an application will get a different approach.

Tags: prism, mozilla, browsers, fluid, interaction, usability.