10/10/2011

Raven - the evolution of browsers?

A few days ago I reviewed Epiphany's awesome website-to-app converter, which saves a website, grabs its icon and turns it into a separate app for that site. Developers at revolutionary browser Raven (specific for OS X) have developed a similar idea.



Popular websites can be installed as web apps with a custom interface - for example, the twitter app offers links to the main feeds from the site - Direct Messages, mentions and timeline - as well as the search function. Web apps are saved on the sidebar, and clicking on them springs a menu with each function.

Raven comes with a host of other cool, minor features (such as allowing you to preview history, distinguishing between favourites and bookmarks, and suggesting sites you'd like based on your history), but their flagship web app idea strikes me as bizarre.

The beauty of the epiphany web app was that the user can decide which websites s/he wants to turn into an app. That doesn't necessarily mean the one that's most used - different websites are more or less suited to the feature. So the fact that a web app needs to be created for each site means firstly that the ability to create a web app is not universal, and secondly that popular sites are turned to web apps regardless of whether they're suited to the format.

In case you still think it logical that the web app should be manually created for each site, consider how impractical it is. Websites are text files describing how they should be laid out - now raven requires a secondary interface! This is understanding for mobiles, who require a different website to work well with their screens, but why a desktop or laptop can't just take an html file as it comes beats me. After all, that's exactly how epiphany's web apps are created automatically - using the html file.

It doesn't stop there - the web apps still open in the browser window. The advantage of separating the site from the browser disappears - I see no difference between this and an oversized favourites bar. In fact, even the idea of the menu that appears when you open the app (illustrated above for facebook) is basically redundant, as all of these functions are a click away anyway on the site, minus the inconvenience of being in a different place when you're using another computer. So not only is it an oversized favourites bar, it also has unnecessary bits.

I'm sure raven will soon gather a cult of enthusiastic OS X users who have managed to convince themselves that it's useful, but as far as I can see this is a perfect example of how a clever idea can be completely useless.

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