Web Browsers, Innovation, and the Future (Premium)

Decades ago, I made the argument that Microsoft popularizing the GUI was its own form of innovation, even though Apple had gotten there first, so to speak, with the Mac. In the same vein, one might argue that the private and secure default configuration provided by the Brave web browser is likewise innovative on some level, even though the browser otherwise functions exactly like Google Chrome and other mainstream browsers.

I am comfortable making that assertion, I guess, but the term innovation has somewhat grander connotations, and one could likewise argue to the contrary that it's possible to make almost any web browser private and secure with the right extensions. And that innovation is really about changing the world. Windows met that bar in the early 1990s, as did the Internet---as embodied by the World Wide Web and the web browsers that we used to access it---in the late 1990s, the iPhone in 2007, and now the AI wave that started in 2023. Put another way, innovation is obvious and inarguable. If it's open to debate, it's not innovative.

And on that note, I'm not sure that any of the web browsers we use or have at least heard of are truly innovative. In fact, from a general usage perspective, these browsers are all the same, whether we look at Chrome, the runaway market leader, second-tier alternatives like Safari, Edge, and Firefox, or third-stringers like Brave, DuckDuckGo, Opera, and Vivaldi. The user experiences aren't just similar, they're nearly identical. Worse, any of these web browsers would be immediately recognizable to a Netscape Navigator-using time traveler from 1996.

Were this fictional time traveler to dig a bit deeper, they would discover that web browsers have, in fact, changed a lot since 1996. It's just that the most profound changes---the real innovation, if you will---has occurred under the covers. And the web these browsers access has evolved as a platform that not only rivals the capabilities we get from native desktop and mobile platforms, but exceeds them by being cross-compatible between both. That is inarguably innovation, and the realization of the dreams expressed by such things as Java in the 1990s---one app that runs everywhere---and Longhorn in the early 2000s, through which Microsoft promised truly scalable user interfaces that would dynamically adapt to different screen sizes, aspect ratios, and bit depths. The web is the only platform that works everywhere.

And yet, the web browsers we use to access this uber platform remain rooted in the user interfaces of the 1990s. As with any popular personal computing product, there was a period of rapid improvement followed by maturity, stasis, and conformity. The biggest UX difference between the Navigator of 1996 and the Chrome of 2023 is probably tabs, and that feature literally dates back to the 1990s---thanks, Opera!---and the MDI/SDI (multiple document interface/single document interface) debates of that era. Hell, tabs are so fundamental to...