I wrote about FOWA and that it feels like living in a closed box. An experience generally improves as you live with it – so, I thought I’d revisit this topic after living with boxed up browser based apps experience for a few months. The verdict – it still sucks! And in the context of misery loves company, it has been heartening to observe many others struggle through this problem!
Other than the things I already observed in my old post, there are some other problems I uncovered as I wade through the mess of my browser tabs. As if it wasn’t already bad enough to have to investigate each tab title to figure out what is where, the worse thing about not having a native app is that the only thing displayed on the browser instance titles on the desktop is the title of the topmost tab! Tabbing through the apps on the device only identifies the browser. Right clicking on the icon only displays the top tab titles. Practically, you have nothing to do other than browse through (pun intended!) the browser tabs!
I recently saw a poor soul searching for a specific document by clicking on each one of the 25 or so tabs he had open on his browser instance, with each click working through a sub-optimal network (and potentially device) to refresh the page, thereby taking several iterations before finding the one he was looking for! I instead tend to create separate browser instances and limit my number of tabs on any one instance to a point where I can read at least the start of the title.
In this age where technology is at the cusp of transitioning from search to discovery and information abundance to relevance, is this the best experience we can build? Aren’t we going backwards here? My day job needs me to get on with this program, but I feel like I’m losing my soul here caving into this backward experience…
TechBits by Vidya Narayanan 