At one time, offline browsing was the holy grail of web development. In the mid-90s, he was a source of inspiration, reflection and growth in the value of companies.
In June 2015, Google Chrome developer Alex Russell posted a post . In this post, he talked about the failed history of developing web-adjacent applications. He talked about the tools that were used to create applications using web technologies that were not native web applications. Russell offered an alternative. He drew attention to the developments in browser technology over the past few years, in which he himself was directly involved.
Russell argued that the web platform has made great progress. It has gotten to the point where applications similar to those you can install from the App store or on your computer can be created directly in the browser. Using various features of the web, we can create a web-based application. Alex and front-end developer Francis Berryman came up with a name for this principle: Progressive Web Applications, or PWA.
PWAs themselves have evolved over time, they consist of many different techniques and technologies. One such technology is a powerful JavaScript feature called Service Workers. Service Workers are scripts that run in the background in the browser. When a user connects to a website, a developer can launch a Service Worker to intercept the request and perform other actions. This feature can be used for a lot of different things, but the only thing PWA is that it allows for offline browsing. After visiting the website, you can use the Service Worker to download the website directly to your device so you can continue to work with it even without Internet access. Once connected to the Internet, the Service Worker can resynchronize all changes.
This was one of the advantages of offline browsing for native apps downloaded directly to mobile devices, compared to web sites running in a browser. Service Workers are the result of several years of work that began even before the advent of the PWA, and they went through several iterations to properly implement offline.
However, the dream of offline browsing originated much earlier ... Back in the days of failed experiments, almost as old as the web itself. This idea was worth millions of dollars, but then everyone forgot about it.
As with PWA, the issue started with channel width. Or, more precisely, because of its absence. Web browsers in the 1990s connected to the Internet over telephone lines. It was expensive, slow, and put a strain on an already congested telecommunications network. In the early 2000s, broadband emerged as a faster solution unique to the information age. But up to this point, the web was very limited and the problem was exacerbated by working with large media files, such as music or videos.
So the web was an insidious thing. Multiple returns to the same page most often did not justify itself. To help users cope with this, a new type of software has emerged as an alternative. These were the tools to bring the web offline. Instead of connecting to a website when you needed to read an article, watch a video, or listen to something, the program downloaded the web page straight to your computer. It could be accessed at any time, even without an Internet connection.
Appearance of WebWhacker, one of the first examples of offline browsing applications
The first attempts were full of errors and inconvenient to use. The programs released in the first half of the 1990s were called WebWhacker, WebEx (the ancestor of the software that Cisco later acquired) and OM-Express. They worked like a digital printer. The user selected a web page, downloaded it to a folder on his computer and viewed it at any time. If he had experience with a computer, he could understand the installation and operation of the software. Otherwise, there might be problems with a complex user interface.
The quality of the programs soon improved. When Freeloader released the second version of its offline browsing software in September 1996, the stakes skyrocketed. Freeloader, the first of the many Internet companies founded by Mark Pinkus, provided a personalized work style based on a "channel" system. Freeloader users could subscribe to websites or groups of websites that were collected into feeds that Freeloader monitored and downloaded new content.
Freeloader was conceived as an alternative way of browsing the web, more passive and "background". The developers focused on features that, in modern terminology, could be called "Netflix for content." The user subscribed to a set of targeted channels, and Freeloader handled downloading content that could be read at any time without an Internet connection.
The popularity of Freeloader has spurred an important content deal with MSNBC. The company has also sought to secure sponsorship deals with partners like IBM and AOL, and has even been able to get funding from Softbank. With over a hundred thousand active users, Freeloader has proven that with the right approach, offline browsing can make money.
In the wake of this excitement, Christopher Hassett burst into the web. He was the founder of PointCast, which was released in beta in early 1996. By the end of that year, Christopher had become CNet's top news story, the man who promised to end browsers forever.
Screenshot of PointCast Network, taken during the brief lifetime of this network.
PointCast has rebranded offline browsing, calling it a loud term: "push" technology. The traditional way of browsing the web with clicking links was, in PointCast terminology, a pull environment, an active process of "pulling" content into the browser. The PointCast Network has revolutionized this principle. Users could subscribe to interests or websites, and then when content was updated, it was pushed to the device, where it was passively consumed. Today you are probably familiar with this paradigm. We now call this push notifications. Wired
articlePointCast and other similar technologies were called “Push! Say goodbye to your browser: the radical future of media lies beyond the web. " ( Wired was not the last time it announced the death of the web .) As a standalone product with a small user base, PointCast was nevertheless heavily covered in the press and a shining star among other emerging dotcoms.
Based on his inflated reputation alone, a year after its release, News Corp offered Hassett to buy his company for $ 450 million. He refused, saying the company was worth twice as much, and began filing for PointCast's public offering.
In 1999, a couple of years later, PointCast was sold for $ 7 million and split into parts.
The problem was not so much the idea as its execution. PointCast Network was implemented as a scrolling screensaver that introduces the user to news and other content while the computer was in sleep mode. This style of work seemed boring to many. And when companies started installing PointCast on their employees' computers, very few noticed. The reason was trivial - by the time the screensaver turned on, no one was looking at the screen. All the hype could not ensure the popularity of a product that users had not even seen.
But more importantly, PointCast has almost completely abandoned the offline principle that was offline browsing. For synchronization and constant streaming of content, the program took up a widerchannel than regular web browsing, and at that time wide channel was still a luxury. In addition, it turned out that most users do not experience any difficulties with downloading content on their own, they just wanted to do it at the right time.
As a result, PointCast's story turned out to be a warning to others. It was cited as an example of the redundancy and missed opportunities of dotcoms. But at the same time, it reflects the culmination of a real need that remained forgotten for almost twenty years until it returned back to the web platform in the form of Service Workers. We cannot have constant reliable access to the Internet. And thanks to offline browsing, it is optional.
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