Back in August 2010, Wired magazine published one of its most famous front covers. In bold black font on a stark red background, the venerable technology magazine declared that "The Web is Dead".
In a long double feature, then Wired editor Chris Anderson and US columnist Michael Wolff declared the time of death as some time earlier that year, and offered an autopsy of sorts for the browser-based "front end" of the internet. "The Web is dead. Long live the Internet" ran the headline, neatly summarising the argument.
"Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display," Anderson wrote. "It's driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it's a world Google can't crawl, one where HTML doesn't rule."
The article caused uproar in the technosphere at the time – sure, mobile apps have added another layer of internet services with which people can interact, went the opposing argument, but to conclude that the web is dead on that evidence is mere sensationalism.
Five years on, and Wired's warning about the state of the web is being debated all over again. Recently, Facebook unveiled Facebook Instant Articles, which sees the social networking giant host content from certain publishers such as the New York Times and the Guardian and serve them up within the Facebook app, shaving time and inconvenience off the process of opening a link to a website. Amid the predictable scepticism about Facebook's "Trojan horse" was a renewed debate why HTML browsers and web technologies are falling behind native apps.
Already in the US, the majority of web traffic is mobile (smartphones and tablets), and the vast majority of mobile traffic is from apps, not mobile web browsers such as Chrome or Safari. Much of that is due to Facebook and YouTube.
Of course, it's possible to argue that these apps are just extensions of the web – Facebook's app is still, technically, a web browser after all. As blogger John Gruber put it: "We shouldn't think of 'the web' as only what renders in web browsers. We should think of the web as anything transmitted using HTTP and HTTPS. Apps and websites are peers, not competitors. They're all just clients to the same services."
‘Next Billion’
The notion of the web browser as being the “definitive” front-end of the internet will seem particularly quaint when the next big “migration” of people from the developing world come online for the first time. The “Next Billion”, as business site
Quartz
describes the influx of new internet users, will predominantly be using Android phones across
India
,
China
and
Africa
, and their arrival will dramatically change the status quo. As
Quartz
reports: “The number of mobile phones in Africa has grown 40-fold since 2000. There are 650 million subscribers in Africa’s mobile phone market-more mobile subscribers than the EU or US.”
Not only will this be the first time most of these people will be online, "for some of them a mobile phone is the first electrical device of any kind they've owned," as technology analyst Benedict Evans has pointed out.
Evans is one of the most perceptive analysts in the business, and recently he teased out the implications of a mobile-first world, and took the web v apps argument to its logical conclusion: smartphones, with their greater array of sensors, APIs and interaction models, will supersede the PC as the predominant mode of interacting with the internet. We can see it in the explosion of social apps, from Instagram and Snapchat to WhatsApp, that would be impossible on a PC, and the increasing number of services and apps that rely on a smartphone's geotagging or camera or movement sensors, all absent on a PC.
“The smartphone is an internet platform in a way that a PC was not,” Evans wrote. “On a PC the web browser was the internet platform, but on a smartphone it’s the entire device and the browser is turned from ‘the internet’ to one icon. We should rather think of the PC as having the basic, cut-down, limited version of the internet, because it only has the web. It’s the mobile that has the whole internet.”
Anderson’s proclamation that “The Web is Dead” was bound up in our conception of what the web was up to that point, and it’s useful to bear that in mind when assessing predictions about technology or innovation – we are all too often trapped in a mental framework based on recent history and progress. In this case, the shift from the PC browser to the smartphone app will come to be seen as the inevitable evolution of the web, rather than its demise. The long-awaited web 3.0, I suspect, is going to look very different from versions one and two.
