Friday, February 1, 2008

Making the browser intelligent

With Mozilla Firefox giving flexibility and framework for independent developers and OEM vendors to add on features and functionalities to the browser, it has opened a whole new chapters of how browsers would be in future.
Today there are many extensions built by vendors which can be loaded on to the browser on demand. Most are written using JavaScript and broadly are of two types.
1. One client based. All the extension code is executed on the browser and attempt is to provide some feature extension to the browsers capabilities.
2. Second client server based. The code again is executed on client side but the data is send to the server, usually a service provided by the vendor itself and the combination of client and server execution is used to serve the user better.

This second type of extension is something of interest to all of us. If we look it leverages the resources on both users machine and central server to provide the service. The service can be of many types, typically custom information based on the content. Further the client can be an intelligent agent trying to know the user better, so as to always send relevant content.

Today there are many web 2.0 sites which claim to serve its users better. To think of it I don't need to register to the any such sites, rather have an extension built into my browser and I am free to use my computer. I believe in future I can do all the tasks using applications embedded withing my browser, say writing mail, preparing a doc, a presentation etc so using computer would mean using the browser. So with time my browser would know me better and serve me better.

Like in web 2.0 we have these flood of social sites, I think with web 3.0 we would have such agents popular with every vendor would like to us to use their agent and may be even pay us to use it.

Adsense revisited!!!

Sachin

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