Not long ago, there was really only one browser—Internet Explorer. It would garner more than 85 percent of the traffic, with AOL and Netscape barely touching the double digit mark. Today, we are witnessing what have come to be known as browser wars. IE and Firefox fighting neck-to-neck, Chrome growing rapidly, smaller Safari and Opera fairly stagnant with arguably loyal user base—and in addition, a plethora of mobile browsers.

With the ability to add on features through plugins, change the look, add processes, and so on, browsers have been on a one-upmanship trip for a while. And yes, it does make some difference to the user. The technologies that the browsers run on are also undergoing constant upgrades. HTML5, for instance, promises to make our browsing experience richer and more intuitive.

The real question, though, is this—what is the future of the browser? There may be a race today, but what is the finish line?

The ways we access the internet have gone up. With the rising use of the cloud, the interface for the net has become more task-specific. In many cases it is an app, not a browser that is talking to the net for us. Machine-to-machine (m2m) communication is on the rise too, where access to the internet would be completely automatic with little or no need for a browser. How long before the browser—at least in the way we see it today—becomes outdated?

The way I see it, the browser has its future right back where it started—in ‘browsing’. It can be the place that allows us to ‘browse’ our options on the internet in any device, and help applications in supplying actual information, entertainment or utility to us.

The “future web” will by default be a more complex place than today, given the developments in mobile, television and m2m environments. Who can provide a browser with interoperability and openness needed in this rich environment?

My view: Find an answer to that and you have found the next winner—simple!

The last year of the last decade has been the start of what must be an era of soul-searching for the web. The initial phase of the web was viewed idealistically. The web was seen as something that brought the best of information and entertainment to us. What’s more, it was all mostly free! Social networking shrunk the world further and brought us in touch with our loved ones. In a nutshell, the web became a symbol of all that we held close to us.

The last year changed that. To be fair, it didn’t all happen last year, we just became more aware of the issues happening. In the past several years, we have increasingly been putting up our lives on the web. First over e-mail and websites and then on blogs, social networking sites, virtual hard disks, etc—more and more of us went up online. And this was not restricted to individual information—it extended to organizations and even governments.

With so much ‘out there’, the onus of protecting that information, and consequently the ownership of it, has become a big question. What was considered essentially uncontrollable and therefore somehow ‘democratic’ came to be seen as controlled and political. What we thought was protected and safeguarded information could be pried open easily, all in public. And this sudden publicity has opened our eyes and raised many questions. Just as there is no answer to who owns the north and south poles or even the moon, there is now no answer to who owns the web. But there are many who want to exercise their power on it—that we have seen.

The time has come for us to question how we want to shape the next generation of the web as more and more of our lives become online. Anything reliable—software, service, website—that truly simplifies and enriches our online lives, will become popular—that is easy to predict. But what is reliable will become an increasingly important question. Who makes the calls and decides when your information/data/service no longer belongs to you? To answer that has just become harder.

One web. All machines talking to each other. The users seamlessly accessing information, services, entertainment and utility out of them—without worrying about the medium.

This is not Vision 2050. In fact, it’s here, just around the corner. In the digital world, machine-to-machine connections are predicted to be the next big wave of telecommunications revenues.

But is it only after 50 billion fridges and vending machines are connected to the web that the industry will start to understand the different UI needs? Today, it seems to be very hard for the industry to realize that a mobile phone is not a PC. Many of the mobile solutions are merely a miniaturization of a 15’’ screen.

Too often I see a group of people being in the same place, their heads down, staring at their small screens. You can’t have consumers poring over 3.5” screens all the time! They deserve the phone features in a more usable format.

Mobile users today want more and more features on their fingertips and on the go—that’s no news. It is the reason why the ‘smart’ phone segment is set to be 22 percent of the total global mobile market by 2012 and more than double in the next two years in India from 2 million users in 2009.

So then why are mobile opportunities so underutilized? Why can’t we innovate solutions that will give the user a more comfortable, enjoyable, useful experience without straining his or her eyes? A touch screen does not need to be touched all the time. A phone can give out alerts, take voice commands or just have simple, one-touch response UI for the convenience of the user.

A mobile phone is a device always in an on-the-go mode, so any application or service that makes the user unnecessarily stop and bend down over the screen for a longer period, is a failure in design (down-time killers are naturally a separate issue).

It is a major error to regard mobile as just a smaller, portable PC—it can be much more, it deserves to be much more.