The Browser is your canvas

After this post about my switching loyalties to Chrome, now for some serious stuff. Irrespective of which browser you use for your online activities, one thing looks pretty certain, going by the sign of the times. The browser is going to rule our online lives for a long time to come. The hype about Windows 7 (and OSX and the gazillion of Linux distros out there) not withstanding, it looks like the next wars will be about browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer though still the most widely used browser (seriously, does anyone use IE?!), is losing market share consistently, and while Chrome is yet to make a sizeable dent in the browser market, it is catching up - and fast. The browser is quickly becoming synomous with just about anything we do with our desktop or notebook. Besides the usual e-mail and web-surfing, an increasing number of apps and services are moving from a desktop-based mode to a web-top based mode. Google mail introduced integrated chat a long time ago, and Yahoo followed suit. So you no longer need to have a separate chat client to IM with your friends and colleagues. Moving on to document creation as well, Google docs allows you to create documents online, using your browser. You can also share the documents you create with your friends online. As cloud-computing gains ground, we have ever-increasing data, residing not on our desktops, but 'in the cloud', free to be accessed from any place that has a WiFi connection. Some of these services - like the Windows Live Mesh - do require you to install a dedicated software, but others just let you access them through your browser. Just open your browser, and you're good to go! 

Some of the recently - well, not that recently - announced services take this one level further. Now I do not even have to use Adobe Reader to view my pdf files on my desktop. Google mail now supports this feature from right within Gmail. There are quite a few document sharing services - like Scribd, and Docstoc - which allow you to upload pdf (and other filetypes, of course) documents and then view them right in your browser window. You can also create, view and share presentations online, right from the (safe?) confines of your browser - thanks to Google presentations and Slideshare. Coming to multimedia, Flickr, Google Photos are long the de-facto standard in photo viewing and sharing. A site called resizeImage.org even offers basic online photo-editing tools like image resizing and cropping. So you no longer have to download that college re-union photo to crop that pretty face from it! Another very recent launched service allows you to 

create, edit, and save Microsoft Office Documents on the server - without downloading the file or any plugins. -- source: TechCrunch. 

With Flash becoming ubiquitous, and media streaming getting bigger and bigger with sites like YouTube, Hulu, Joost, we are now watching more videos online - again, in our browser - rather than on our desktop. YouTube is already serving 100 million videos every day, and this number will only grow bigger. 

So where does all this lead to? Will we see the browser becoming the next OS - in a manner of speaking? Will everything that we do on our desktops or notebooks be in a browser window? Techcrunch is already building a Tablet prototype, where the browser takes centerstage. The signs are definitely there. Win the browser market and win the world, anyone?