There’s a good article over on Wired whereby the author, Michael Calore, tried spending a month replacing some of his desktop applications with Google Apps.

He replaced some of his trusty desktop applications with their online Google equivalent, and tried to carry as normal.

His feedback was interesting; “Tellingly, my transition to Google’s suite of apps felt the most seamless when managing my own personal flow of data. It was only when I tried to match my web-powered ambitions with my desktop-centric workplace that I was forced to go back to using desktop apps for specific tasks. Had I conquered these workplace integration problems, my experiment would have come closer to total success.”

The point that I was most interested in, however, was that he began to suffer from browser claustrophobia: “While I grew more and more accustomed to my new digital home as the days and weeks wore on, I initially found working exclusively in a web browser to be, for lack of a better word, weird.”

This is interesting - as we like to move around a room, shift position, move offices and change the dynamics of the workplace around us, so it is the same with a computer desktop and applications. We prepare our copy in word, shift to Outlook for email. Perhaps we might go online and do a little bit of Basecamp.

Whatever your setup you are doing it in different applications. Different environments.

But to do everything within one application, one browser - could this lead to browser tedium? Perhaps browser developers should be looking to offer greater levels of personalization - better colorsets, more versatility, more scope to personalize the experience.