Changing the Social Contract of the Web

Hi folks (and/or mobile Web fans as the case may be) -

One of the questions that has crossed my mind as I've been reading the conversations on this thread is : how do people think about using the Web as opposed to using apps, and does "closing the gap" between the Web and apps necessitate changing those perceptions? Indeed, are those perceptions (which have built up after a decade of usage) already changing under our feet?

The "social contract" of the Web is that you open your browser, type a URL into the address bar (or select a bookmark or similar) and away you go interacting with some content or service provider. When I go to slashdot.org I see a page of articles and I'm able to read them and otherwise interact with the content – leave comments, troll, etc… I can do things from the browser chrome (e.g. bookmarking) that I generally understand are not to do with the Web site but with my browser. When I go to Slashdot.org on an (IOS) mobile device however, I am asked if I want the "new mobile" experience. If I select "yes" I get a page that starts to act more like an app – for instance, pulling the page down refreshes the content, mirroring the gesture-driven UI of native apps. I'm also prompted to add a bookmark to "my home screen." If I do this, I get an icon sitting next to my other apps with no visual indication that this is a bookmark to the Web. If I tap it, it comes up in its own chromeless web view (possibly with different security context – no way of knowing), apparently as an app but actually a webapp. I can't get access to the URL bar from this Web view, nor can I bookmark or do other functions normally available from the browser chrome – the experience is totally constrained to what the webapp is doing in the web view.

So this is one example of how a webapp manifests on mobile – not a hybrid app (which I think is defined by use of a packaging tool to package a webapp inside a native shell) but a fully mobile webapp that needs nothing other than the browser to function, but none-the-less manifests as a native app.. There are many other nuances that you could go into and obviously this only describes the IOS experience.

My point is : this may be the Web but not as we know it. The kind of user experience described above changes the user impression of what the Web is – it changes the social contract of the Web.

And are we OK with that?

Dan