Apple got this right with iTunes and I think that the success of iTunes owes a lot to this. When you visit the iTunes Store in iTunes you see an iTunes display that just happens to be served from the web. You’re not in a browser and you can’t navigate to another site. Your application is served from the web.

There are many other applications that should run like that. Google’s Gmail and Google Docs should run like that, as should all the applications on Zoho. In fact, let’s be precise about this, the Mac or PC desktop is the workspace. By making the browser become a workspace, which is what happened, you end up with a workspace within a workspace and that’s just plain peanut brain.

It gets worse. The browser has effectively constrained web site design so that it presumes a browser and hence it has stuck with being a set of linked pages. In most products, when you invoke help which happens to be Internet-based, you get Internet pages, rather than a help subsystem that happens to be fed from the web. That’s the point here. The connection between an application and the web should be seamless instead of browser based.

Admittedly, and hopefully, this is changing with AJAX, Adobe Air, SilverLight, etc. But right now few people are thinking in the right direction. The whole point is that the browser should be an application that is mostly invisible. Some screen space needs to be given up to searching and bookmark libraries, for the sake of surfing, but that’s about it.

I will, in future postings, devote some time to how to be productive with the browser and email on the Mac.

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