Firefox mods are the first hint towards such browsers. Flock focuses on media sites like Flickr and YouTube (they have loads of other social features but they aren’t particularly good or unique) and Wyzo focuses on BitTorrent downloads. But they are still full fledged browsers and do not really focus on their characteristics features to really stand out. As more and more web 2.0 apps develop and as more people start adopting standards, we’ll start getting more advanced hybrid-browsers.
Let’s take a look at the some of the possible hybrid-browsers.
1. Wikipedia: A rather obvious one, Wikipedia can easily transform into a hybrid-browser that only browses through Wikipedia articles and has a layout and controls that allows users to easily view, and modify articles. The mock-up shown above is what I believe such a browser might look like.
2. Flickr: As I mentioned previously, Flock already allows you to browse images, and even upload to your Flickr account. A true Flickr app would allow you to do much more, including tag images, run more complex searches, and even edit images. And not just those on your Flickr account, but it would also allow you to catalog, tag and edit local images, and synchronize it with your online account.
3. Technorati: This is a bit more complex than the previous two. One possibility is that Technorati could become a “Blog Reader” of sorts, which would allow users to read their favorite blogs and discover new ones via Technorati’s search function. Of course it would need to be more than just a RSS Reader, if it could display the actual blog rather than the feed (it is after all a hybrid-browser), while retaining the ability to mark individual posts as read or unread, and save them, it would be a giant leap forward.
These were just a few examples; the actual possibilities are far more reaching. Bandwidth won’t be a restriction anymore, since only the (dynamic) content would need to be downloaded. The original benefits of the web-based applications are retained, the applications can automatically updates itself and have social features out-of-the-box and such. And whenever offline, some of the applications could still have some functionality, such as editing images using the “Flickr App”, or reading cached Wikipedia articles and other blog posts.
Of course, not all web services can be comfortably put into a hybrid-browser alternative. Certain websites will always need to be visited using a traditional browser, while other services would need to be integrated with the operating system itself. One example would online storage, such as Microsoft’s SkyDrive, which would automatically be used to back up your local files without needing any input from you.