Wednesday, 21. December 2005, 02:16:53
Each day we spend more and
more time on the web than doing anything else in our computers. We are increasingly
preferring online applications than the traditional offline desktop-based ones. The most vivid examples are email clients, calendars and scheduling applications, newsfeeds aggregators, pictures and video managers, maps, and even online office suites and desktops. Some people have also talked about complete (or at least highly usable) web-based operating systems as a possibility in the future.
There are several reasons for all this. First, there are lots of free alternatives out there for many different kinds of applications. They are often
more configurable and adaptable than their desktop counterparts (read theming, internationalization and localization, extendibility via plugins and open
APIs). But perhaps the most important reason of all is the
consistency and availability from a variety of differing systems and platforms. Some of these applications have also alternate but similar interfaces for mobile devices. This simple fact ensures that you see
the same interface no matter where you are, if at work or at home, or if you are on someone else's computer, or in some Internet cafe while on your trip to Seychelles, or on that six-months stay on board the International Space Station orbiting the Earth.
But there is a single application that will hardly even have an online counterpart, not to mention a counterpart worth the switch. And that would be
the web browser. The web browser is our permanent window to this immense zoo of blooming web desktops and applications. The web browser is the interface that
doesn't travel with you as the rest of the set does. You could get to Seychelles and find out that they only have browsers X and Y, but they don't have Z, your browser of choice. Or you could find your self reinstalling a new box at home, and you have to go through all the process again. The process of fine-tuning your browser just the way you like it.
Opera already does a good job in this respect. Most of the configuration files inside the browser's profile folder are reusable. You can save them and restore them later on another computer, or give it away to other users. But I've had issues reusing Opera profile folders from Windows into a Linux user account, for example.
It doesn't work out of the box. And even if it would, it will always imply an extra effort of backup and restore.
Imagine if Opera Community members could have their basic
Opera customizations synchronized and stored online, as part of their user account in the community. This certainly doesn't solve all the problems of accessing the web from different places, but at least we could have a central configuration repository. And any changes you do to your interface (such as modifying your bookmarks or toolbars and menu layout), would be
instantly available no matter where you start up Opera from.
Some other suggestions combined, such as developing a
PortableOpera (as in
PortableFirefox), could make this browser a real killer. Can you imagine your self with Opera installed in your
USB flash memory stick (Linux, Windows and OSX could coexists), and authenticated against the Opera Community web site. The browser could also
incorporate some of the community portal functionality, such as a built-in or plugin blog add-post interface and just about anything else you can imagine in terms of integration.
WIDGETIZE