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Browser-based applications: popular but flawed?

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Abstract

Browser-based applications (BBAs), applications built on top of web browsers, dominate the world of Internet Applications today but are fundamentally flawed because the web browser is a weak platform for applications. Three characteristics of the browser—page orientation, statelessness, and limited computation—combine to produce a set of practical problems for BBA users. These problems include delays and discontinuities, confusion and errors, clumsy interfacing and limited functionality, printing problems, and filing difficulties. The paper analyzes these usability problems, providing numerous examples and tracing them back to underlying browser characteristics. The paper also examines the factors that make BBAs so popular despite their flaws. The paper concludes by considering directions for understanding the phenomenon better and for improving the current state of Internet Applications.

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Notes

  1. This assessment of pure browser characteristics does not reflect the features of such add-on technologies as Java applets and Flash applications, considered later in the paper.

  2. Cookies were introduced, in part, to overcome the independence problem. But while cookies are stored on the client machine by the browser (as agent for the server), it is the server, not the browser, that pays attention to their content. The browser remains stateless. Moreover, HTTP cookies are problematic in a number of ways (Fielding and Taylor 2002).

  3. The introduction of javascript provided browsers with some local computation. But javascript was implemented as a kludge (Togazzini and Nielsen 2001) and the information-processing capabilities it affords are limited in significant ways.

  4. Clicking the “Add to Cart” button at Barnes&Noble.com can be even more disorienting for the buyer (and counterproductive for the e-seller). Netscape Navigator has on occasion responded by retrieving and rendering a page from Netscape.com beckoning the viewer to buy books at Amazon.com. It is difficult to imagine such a perverse phenomenon in a non-browser-based application.

  5. This paragraph considers a pure browser-based approach to chat to illustrate the differences between BBAs and specialized-client applications (SCAs). In practice, many web-based chat systems use Java applets to avoid the problems of a pure browser-based approach.

  6. Ironically, cookies—which were intended to help compensate for the browser’s statelessness—can actually contribute to this confusion surrounding the state of the application (Fielding and Taylor 2002).

  7. Graham goes on to claim that web pages are “just good enough,” however, given the other benefits of web-based applications.

  8. One might argue that BlackBoard could have worked around this problem the way many other BBAs have by putting the buttons at the top and bottom of the page. But the very need to employ a work-around highlights this inherent BBA interfacing weakness. Moreover, BlackBoard likely had good reason for not placing buttons at the top of the page. BlackBoard takes a restrictive approach that forces the user to confront the full form before submitting it. A non-browser-based approach, however, could have implemented this restrictiveness without requiring so much scrolling.

  9. In fairness to BBAs, there is another obstacle to more widespread electronic filing: Most users are not yet sufficiently disciplined in backing up their files, and home users and many office users are not on networks that backup automatically, so printing is a safer alternative to electronic filing if preserving the information is important.

  10. Express Scripts reduced the process to a single step by automatically invoking the browser’s print function on the printable version page and then immediately loading the next page required by the user. If the downloading and rendering take place fast enough, the user may hardly notice the intermediate printable version page. But the kludginess of this clever approach—which has the potential to confuse the user—is itself testimony to the deficiency of the browser as a platform.

  11. Support for browsing is a natural for BBAs but this virtue does not belong exclusively to them. SCAs can also offer good browsing. Increasingly the few specialized Internet client applications that we have are including scaled-down browsers (mini-browsers) or the ability to launch a full browser. For example, such media players as Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, MMJukeBox and WinAmp provide their users with access to web-based media guides and the like. Quicken embeds a mini-browser for accessing financial news. Yahoo’s FinanceVisionnow defunct but an excellent example of an SCAincluded a generalized browser window. Indeed, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Gecko (the engine behind Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, and Firefox) can be embedded in specialized applications.

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Acknowledgment

I appreciate the helpful comments made by Lynne Markus, Amjad Umar, Sidne Ward, Burt Swanson, Michael Shaw, and two anonymous reviewers on earlier versions of this paper

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  1. Fordham University, Suite 604C 113 W. 60th Street, New York, NY, 10023, USA

    Mark S. Silver

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  1. Mark S. Silver
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Correspondence to Mark S. Silver.

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Silver, M.S. Browser-based applications: popular but flawed?. ISeB 4, 361–393 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-005-0024-3

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