Kilian Valkhof

Which one of these is not a web browser?

Getting people to understand what we webdevelopers do can be hard. Just look at the infamous Google video asking people what a web browser is, with no one having a clue. OMG!Ubuntu! recently posted about something similar, where a question on the Indian “Who wants to be a millionaire” was “Which one of these is not a web browser?”. The choice was between Firefox, Opera, Facebook and Chrome. Did the contestant pick correctly?

She did! #

…But it took the entire audience.

What interested me though, is the conclusion OMG!Ubuntu! came with:

But dig a little deeper and people are actually a lot smarter than given credit for. Had those people […] been given a laptop and asked to log in to Facebook the majority would’ve managed it fine.

And that’s just it. Who cares if people don’t know the difference between a browser and a search engine. They can use their computers to visit your website, that’s awesome.

Apps #

On Ubuntu (and mac OSX, too) the lines between a web app and a desktop app are blurring. You can use HTML + CSS + javascript to make desktop apps, and websites can be installed as if they were regular applications. With desktop and web apps blurring together, the concept of a browser is getting increasingly vague.

Knowing what a browser is isn’t important, it’s knowing how to use one that is.