If a web site contains asynchronous calls or doesn’t work like a regular webpage in some way, it’s being labeled with the notorious Web 2.0 tag. Regardless of my feelings about the hype surrounding it, I believe that we’re actually seeing a preview or teaser of what we’ll really consider a second version of the web. Why? Because we still do everything in a web(page) browser.

The existence of the back button makes me feel like we’re actually in transition rather than entering the next level. Webpages have a connection to books or magazines where a user can go back or forward at will. A website that requires refreshes between page changes fits this paradigm. New web apps, whether created with Flash or AJAX, break the much-used back button, and the user loses the page turning connection that is central to the current generation of web browsers. While it is possible to make the new apps work better with a browser’s navigation system, it usually requires some heavy-duty hacks that don’t work in all browsers. Future browser versions may include better support, but I don’t think that’s the direction we’re going.

To truly reach Web 2.0, I think a new kind of browser is needed. We need a specialized viewer specifically designed for web applications. Macromedia hinted at this future with its Central product, but I think that’s just the tip of the iceburg. Web content in this new browser won’t have to deal with the baggage of page viewing. I think web apps will evolve to behave a lot more like desktop applications, except we’ll see some great new features that take better advantage of the Internet connection than a desktop application could. Likewise, as people become more and more used to computers, especially at earlier ages, and because the Internet allows easier experimentation, I think we’ll see some exciting new interface ideas that could change the way we interact with the PC (and a lot of bad ones too).

I certainly don’t see the traditional page browser going away, either. The two viewers have different purposes that may partially overlap, but they complement each other with their differences. I think the traditional browser will move closer to its roots, and we’ll see it being used more and more for displaying content focused on text pages. Multimedia content probably won’t go away in the page browser, but it will be used more to complement the text. Many complain that the evolution of web pages to include applications and dynamic content is causing the amount of quality information to suffer. I think as the migration of applications is made to the new browser, we’ll see a strong increase of real quality content back in the traditional text browser. If what I’ve seen lately in the acceptance of web standards and the seperation of style and content is any indication, we’ll continue to see an increase in this division. Focus will be placed on providing useful content, and the designers can style it in any way imaginable without blocking out users that don’t support that styling method. Content is king.