The idea of web browser as something more is catching on

Dave Hyatt, member of the Safari team at Apple and former contributer to Chimera, posted a bit on his weblog yesterday about integrating RSS reading into the web browser:

I’ve heard a lot of people state that RSS and news aggregators are for ‘geeks’ and ‘blogging enthusiasts,’ but I simply don’t believe that to be true. It should be possible to make an application for managing a large amount of information flow that is accessible to mainstream users. Browsers are trying to make information easier to manage with smarter bookmarking systems and page management capabilities (tabs), and news readers are emerging that (in effect) push new information to you in as it’s posted and allow you to switch rapidly between different information sets as well.

His comments and the ensuing thread mirror much of the discussion around the Sherfari idea (follow-up). I envy Dave…I think this would be a really fun project to work on for Apple.

Update: yet another post/thread on Dave’s weblog re: Browser++. The ensuing thread is useful only if you like reading about what technically-inclined power users (about 0.0002% of the population) want out of a web browser. User-centered whuzzah?