Using browser extensions to enhance user's browsing experience

What is a browser extension?

A browser extension is a piece of add-on software that is installed inside the browser and extends the browser's functionality. Addition of functionality can vary based on the browser. New functionality can be added at two levels:

1. To the current webpage: Based on the contents of the webpage currently loaded on the browser screen, an extension adds extra content to it that aids the user in some way and enhances his/her experience on the page. E.g. hyperlink all postal addresses on a page and offer to open them in a map if the user clicks on any of them.
2. To the browser as a whole: The browser itself exposes extra functionality which can be used on any page. Such functionality creates a new option on the browser's toolbar or menu or shows a new status on the status bar. E.g. one touch social media sharing button.

To explore exactly how extra functionality can be added to the browser, let us look at some real life examples of browser extensions.

Add to Pocket

Pocket is a popular service to store webpages for offline use, so that the user can read it later (in fact the tools was called Read It Later before it was renamed to Pocket). Since it is too tedious for the user to open up the Pocket website everytime s/he finds an interesting webpage, Pocket created a browser extension which creates a conveniently placed button on the toolbar. On clicking the button, the contents of the current page are automatically saved to the Pocket service without the user having to visit the Pocket website.

Read more about Pocket service here.

Buy Hatke

E-commerce is really big in India and the competition is cut-throat. Right now, there are at least 6 major players in the sector, with another 30-40 who are breathing down the necks of the top 6. The websites try to attract attention to each other by offering discounts and cashbacks all the time. As offers fly by and prices are slashed further and further, the user finds it hard to keep track of where s/he can find the best deals. Enter Buy Hatke. When the user searches for an item on site A, Buy Hatke finds out if there are special deals offered by competition. If so, then a small bar pops up at the top of the current page and the user can choose to navigate away to the website which offers the deal. At the time of purchase, Buy Hatke also looks for coupon codes offered by famous services like Groupon, which it tries to apply to the item being purchased and shaves off more from the final payable amount.

Read more about Buy Hatke extension here.


Search by Image



Google have always made web browsing easy with their highly relevant search results and images. However they have taken things a step further with 'search by image' feature. One can query by image. They have an extension that puts a small blue camera when the user hovers over an image on any website. Clicking on the camera takes the user to Google's search by image website and the user can search about what is the image. The example above shows how the user ends up with results for Bhutan when s/he clicked on the monastery image.

Read more about Google Search by Image here.

Why create / use browser extensions?

Over the last 5-6 years, users have begun to use smartphones and tablets to go with their desktops and laptops. They use desktops while at office or at home for involved work, leisurely surfing and in-depth research, for which a large screen offers maximum benefits. They use laptops for work and research on the move. Phones are used for information at a glance, messaging and chatting, context-aware usage based on GPS and sensors and for casual photography and recording. Content creators customise the experience of their offerings to suit different screen sizes and contexts by making rich websites, responsive websites, apps and widgets.

However onc use case has been ignored in the midst of all these multiple-screen experiences. Sometimes, the one thing that the user does NOT want is multiple screens. E.g. it is a big distraction for the user to switch between two tabs of a browser or to look alternatively between the computer screen and the phone screen. Sometimes the user would like everything combined into one integrated workspace instead of switching windows, tabs or devices. This is the pain that browser extensions address. We saw the example of Add to Pocket extension above. The beauty of that extension is that the user can send any webpage to the Pocket cloud instead of having to open the Pocket website and switching between tabs. The value of Buy Hatke is that the extension prompts about better offers without the user having to keep 20 tabs open to check prices in 20 different e-commerce sites, nor does s/he have to open the Groupon app on his/her phone to look for discounts. Google Search by image offers the user to query for images directly from any website without having to leave that website.

Where can I get browser extensions?

Browser extensions are specific to particular browsers and are not compatible with the others. The browser that supports by far the most number of extensions is Firefox, followed by Chrome. Safari and Opera have decent support for extensions, but Internet Explorer has very limited support for extensibility using add-ons. IE does however support the concept of browser 'plugin' which is a topic for a different post. But to give you an idea, installing IE plugins is more like installing software on your desktop with a seperate installer file, rather than an intuitive experience from the browser.

• To get extensions for the Chrome browser, one can check out Chrome Web Store.
• For Firefox, extensions can be installed from Firefox Add-ons
• For Safari extensions, head over to Safari Extensions
• Opera browser can be extended using add-ons on Opera Add-ons

How can I make a browser extension for my service?

You have made a cool online service XYZ. Now you want to make the user's life awesome. How can you go about building extensions for your service?

Each browser requires its own process for browser development. At the end of the day, the browser extension is built and submitted to the corresponding Web store / Add-ons store. However extensions can also be hosted on one's own website.

• To build extensions for Chrome, the tutorial is here.
• You can learn about starting to build a Firefox extension here.
• Safari Extensions Development Guide is your definitive guide to enhance your service's experience on Safari.
• This page has all the info that you need on making add-ons for Opera.

Conclusion

While a typical Internet savvy user spends most of his/her time on the smart phone and apps today, that time is not 100%. Some part of the day is spent actually sitting in front of a PC / Mac / laptop to get work and research done and switching between tabs and screens is definitely a pain. So, while not as hot in the market as mobile apps, browser extensions do have a massive fan following and the number of extension installs everyday does speak volumes about their utility.

We have all been solving problems for the user on the go using mobile technology. However, if you find that the next problem that you want to solve should target the sit-at-desk user using a browser, consider building a browser extension. He/she will be grateful to you for it. Probably you should make a 'thank you' button on the toolbar to go with your extension, to compose and send a 'thank you' email to your email address automatically.

How going Open Source empowers you: Part 2

In the last post How going Open Source empowers you: Part 1, we saw the advantages for someone who chooses to use open source software. In order to use open source software, someone must first decide to release such software. But the very nature of open source software is that the secret sauce, i.e. the source code is released along with the software. Does this make business sense?

How the world understands (assumes) business works

Let us first look at why common beliefs about business screams out a big NO to open source. In a traditional business model, there are certain goods and services in which the market supply is much higher that the market demand. Let us take e.g. burritos. An average metropolis has hundreds of dedicated Mexican restaurants. World's top cities like New York and London might in fact have more Mexican restaurants than Mexico City has. A person who wants to eat a burrito has practically hundreds of locations to choose from inside his/her own city. There must be five to ten locations within a stone's throw away. How can a Mexican outlet attract a customer's attention and retain him/her. By differentiating in taste. The most exotic or authentic taste wins. If in such a competitive environment, the restaurant gives away the recipe, it would be a business equivalent of a suicide. How then can there be benefits in open source?

Let us look at some of the points that despite the above argument have motivated companies / individuals to open source their offerings.

How open sourcing your offering empowers you

#1. Having an open source offering online is more valuable than the best written resume

This is the most unsung benefit of having an open source project online. Sure, one can always contribute to an existing open source project to make it better. But having a project of your own from the scratch is even more eye catching. College students who have released a project to the public along with the source code have stimulated the infatuation of powerhouses like Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and scores of others. Let us look at some examples.

1. Linus Torvalds submitted Linux as a university project.
2. RSA algorithm, which forms the basis for data encryption and network security around the world today was a university project by three students whose names' first letters were assigned to the algorithm (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman).
3. Sun microsystems, purchased by Oracle about a decade ago, has a name based on a acronym SUN, which stands for Stanford University Networks. Their initial success was around the success of their operating system named Solaris, which was proprietary. But the foundations of Solaris were around many smaller modules released as university-level community supported modules.

These three are examples of really big projects which almost made the students' resume redundant.

#2. Not everyone can cook, given the recipe. You will still have substantial market share and in fact will be the pioneer

Duplication and competition is one of the biggest fears that businesses have. Let me put it this way. Whether or not a business shares its secrets, there will always be individuals and organisations who will try to copy its products and services and achieve a reasonable level of success. There will be a certain section of customers who will find that duplicate good enough for their needs, if it is priced aggressively in comparison to the original. If you walk along the street shops of any Asian city, there will be duplicate Phillips players, duplicate Burberry suits, duplicate Nike shoes and a lot of other duplicate wares. Do you think they do not sell? They do so like hot cakes. The prices are a tenth or even a twentieth of the original and there is a substantial number of takers for that price. But with daily use, one will notice that the duplicates behave like ... well ... duplicates!

Even if a dish's recipe is shared, a suit's weaving technique described in detail in a manual or a a piece of furniture's carpentry shot elaborately in a video, there is only a small section of individuals or businesses who can successfully replicate a process down to the last instruction to the same amount of success. The original source's reputation as the master is generally very safe.

What about goods and items that can be copied and resold? Movies, software and music for instance? In a world of 7 billion humans, it is hard to comb through all the piracy already rampant and to enforce laws against the miscreants. Pirated copies are happily exchanging hands either for a fraction of the price or for free. While not common in the west, Asian countries have long been indulging in sharing material through piracy. In fact, piracy is what makes a lot of otherwise very expensive music, movies and software visible to more eyes. If the quality is really good, these persons may consider paying for the next concert or the movie or the next version of the software.

With both cases considered, if a business releases its offering as open source, there is a fairly little chance that anyone who tries spin off his / her own version using the source will have the same level of success as the original. Likewise, opening up the source will allow the offering to get more eyeballs and there is a chance that those persons might consider getting the next offering directly from the original business. There is the added advantage that the business will have started a mass adoption of their offering and will be considered a pioneer, which might be due to #3.

#3. Opening up a product will open more opportunities for additional business much more rapidly than a closed product

Companies are always looking for ways to increase their income by selling side products such as accessories along with their main product, thus spawning a range of products. In the hair care industry, a shampoo is best accompanied by conditioners and hair oils.

How can opportunities like this be created in an open source offering? Let us consider our 'burger with a recipe' example from our previous post. Our fictitious cafe C had decided to offer the recipes for burgers along with the burgers. Let us assume that this spurred some customers to try the burgers at home. How can cafe C leverage the opportunity that they just opened up. Instead of looking at the customers as competition, they can look at them as allies. They can segregate the customers into groups. Some of the customers might not even know where to start. Cafe C can sell a starter kit which contains all the ingredients packed, chopped up and just ready to be cooked (Indian business iChef does exactly that).

At another level, some customers may need quality kitchenware to make the burgers taste as close to Cafe C's as possible. Cafe C can tie up with kitchen supply outlets and ask the customers to quote a coupon code to the outlet in return for a discount. The coupon code tells the outlet that this customer was referred to by Cafe C and they pay them a commission for every customer referred.

In general, an ecosystem can be created for completely different business models for Cafe C, just because their recipe is open sourced and they have customers who are willing to try to use that recipe.

After open sourcing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat went out to the market to see how people are using their offering. They found two very promising use cases.

1. A large bulk of users were using Red Hat Linux to host their web servers. Linux as an operating system for web servers is legendary. But Linux alone is not enough for a computer to be a web server. Most of the web servers were powered by J2EE and used web services such as Tomcat to set up a J2EE environment. The users were complaining about how tedious the setup was and how Tomcat was not scaling enough for their needs. Red Hat saw the chance to build a better J2EE environment to accompany their Red Hat Linux operating system. Along came JBoss, which went on to become a very hit platform for web services.
   
   
   
2. With the release of Red Hat Linux came aspiring professionals who went on to become experts in the field of setting up, maintaining and securing Linux machines. But the experts were looking for some kind of accredition for their hard work. While Microsoft had certifications like MCSD (Microsoft Certified Software Developer) and Cisco had CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Administrator), Linux experts had no accolades to call their own. Red Hat jumped at the opportunity and started the RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) accredition. Red Hat now certifies hundreds of thousands of RHCEs per year and earns millions of dollars as certification fees.
   
   
   

Conclusion

As you can see, open sourcing one's business offering may seem like a suicide at first, but after a careful study of how open source companies have done in the past 10-15 years, the case for business models using open source software is extremely compelling. After all, companies like Facebook, Google, Apache, Red Hat and Twitter have not done bad at the market at all. Each of these companies have made open sourcing a core principle in their way of operating and have found enough business models to turn into blockbuster hits for their share holders, customers and investors.

How going Open Source empowers you: Part 1

One of the most common buzzwords used in technology today is 'Open Source'. We keep hearing every now and then that a company A has made its offering open source. And on the other hand, we hear that a company B has switched its entire systems from proprietary solution X to open source solutions Y. And it is not tiny organisations that we are talking about. It is companies like Google, Oracle and Apache. Now before we see why those companies are using open source products and why they making their products open source, we need to understand what is open source.

Open source: When you give away the recipe along with the dish

Imagine that a cafe C's burgers are very popular. But imagine a twist in the story. While there is no doubt that the burgers sell because of their taste, a lot of people actually flock to the cafe to buy the burgers because along with the burger, they give away the detailed recipe inside the folds of the paper napkin. Cafe C does not mind if any of their customers replicates the recipe and goes on to make his or her own success in direct competition with C. Now image a woman W, whose milk shakes are a rage in her locality. Everytime she serves her guests some of her popular milk shake, they ask for the recipe and she willingly gives it to them. Since she serves milk shakes to guests who visit her home, she isn't charging for them.

Thus we see two categories of open source software. The cafe C's burgers are commercial Open Source Software, since one purchases a burger first in order to get the recipe, but the recipe will be part of the burger, no questions asked. Woman W's milk shake falls in a category called FLOSS or Free Libre Open Source Software, which is both open source and free of cost.
Linux by itself is a FLOSS, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a type of commercial OSS.

But wait, you may ask, if you give away your recipe, how can you make money? How does it make business sense to sow the seeds of your own competition? We will get back to OSS from the point of view of the open source producer in the next post. We shall first see how adopting open source software as a consumer empowers the adopter.

How open source software empowers the adopter

#1: Adopting open source lets you hike on your own thrilling path

Most of the hill stations in the world offer two ways in which you can go from the base of the mountain to the top.

One way is to take the national highway that starts from town B at the base of the mountain to the summit S which is the hill station at the top of the mountain. The path is paved and safe and user-friendly in the sense that the driver just have to follow the road wherever it takes them and does not have to worry about how to navigate to the top of the mountain. There are hotels, restaurants and motels along the way, making the tourist's experience very comfortable. The driver must follow lane disciple and must follow speed limits. Often the roads are narrow and winding and the driver is forbidden from stopping on scenic spots such as a beautiful waterfalls or if he/she spots some rare species on the road. The road may pass places where there are drop-dead gorgeous views across valleys where the driver's car cannot reach, because the highway authorities did not care to lay roads to that point. Occasionally, people who travel by the highway may write to the government to lay roads to spots where the tourists are dying to go, but the government may or may not relent, because of their own agenda. The government has set a bottomline for the highway, i.e. reaching from town B to hill station S. Everything else is out of their agenda and will not be given priority.

But there are some people who seek the thrill and adventure and simply refuse to use a highway which they find boring. They use a hiking trail which weaves through the heart of the mountain. They go at their own pace, shooting pictures, discovering new species, wandering off the trail to explore hidden spots and come away with an experience that thrills. On the other hand, they are left to their own faculties. There is no official route, so the hikers will have to pay attention to the trail. They may occasionally get lost and need a lot of patience to find their way back. They usually have to carry their own food and water. Since there is not official documentation on the trail, hikers usually reach out to hiker communities for their solutions.

It is the same with proprietary and open source software. Proprietary software is easy to use, but are stuck to a bottomline and are often not customisable. Requests to add or enhance features may or may not be entertained and if acknowledged, will be released along with the next version. This incurs a long wait. Open source software is flexible and customisable, but there is little or no documentation, so the strength of the community who use that software are often the best entities to reach out to when there is trouble.

#2: Adopting open source provides a lot of choices

Large food chains like McDonald's, KFC and Burger King have a very standard menu. There are probably about 15-20 items on their menu throughout the year and the menu has not changed for decades, save for a few seasonal variations. You can walk into one of these outlets and bet on the fact that the taste will be the same every single time. Amazingly, the taste is the same in almost every outlet in the world, with a few tiny variations in spiciness. The chains generally have a formula for how they make their items and guard it very secretively. Their standard global recipe and the resulting consistent taste are what make people coming back to them. We can debate the healthiness of the food, but there is no doubt that the taste experience that they have researched and come upon so secretly is so addictive! For a while! If you have the items in these outlets for more than a year, chances are that you will be bored and seek out some new experiences.  But, new experiences are the ONE thing that these chains do not have to offer. You either love their menu... or you dont!

Contrast this with eating noodles. As one of the most shared recipes in the world, noodle dishes have been imagined and re-imagined by thousands of eateries around the world. Packaged as Nestle's Maggi instant noodles, which cooks in just 2 minutes, served in the costliest of china clay in upscale outlets like Nooodle Bar (the three O's are intentional), sold in street food eateries in India, Thailand and Malaysia under various banners such as Hakka, Char Kway Teow and many different forms, noodles are as ubiquitous a fast food as anything can get. And they come with different textures and tastes. Long strands, thin strands, thick strands, tape-shaped, sour, hot and spicy, hot and sweet.... you name it, you get it. The main reason is that no single organisation withheld the recipe of noodles. Noodle recipes have passed many mouths, been written in many recipe books and have transcended multiple generations. In fact, so wide is the spread of noodle recipes that many street food eateries in India serve noodles steeped in Schezwan sauce as 'Chinese noodles', although the taste is quite Indian!

Open source software spreads in the same way. We have lost count of the number of different forms of Linux running in the world. Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, Debian just to name a few. The most famous form of Linux is of course Android. Android itself has been customised by various companies such as Sony, Samsung, LG, HTC and One Plus. In the end, the customer has a staggering variety of choices and he/she can pick what is best for him/her.

However it does mean that a user sometimes has way too many choices and as many communities. Each community will suggest using the variant that it follows. The user is left paralysed with choices even before he / she can start.

#3. Adopting open source frees the adopter from usage licenses and permits

Adding to 'the highway and the hike' example from #1, to use a highway, one must pay a toll. Some toll booths are happy to let you use the highway multiple times on the same day, while other toll booths mandate that a toll be paid every time the highway is used. The driver who drives on the highway must have a valid driver's license. To reduce pollution and congestion, some regions in the world also levy a pollution / congestion tax for entry of vehicles inside certain cities or towns or green zones. Most of these restrictions and fees are also on a per vehicle basis, i.e. the permits are issued based on a vehicle's license plate. So multiple vehicles will require multiple permits.

In contrast, a hiker can walk into his / her preferred hiking zone and camp for days together. Sure, there are special zones which require a small fee to be paid for permits from units like the forest department, but in general, you can just walk into hiking trails without having to think about any special permissions.

To use open source software, all that the user needs to do is download, install and use. There are no 'I agree to EULA (End User License Agreement which prohibits a user from sharing his / her copy of the software with others)' screens or any screens where product codes have to be keyed in. The user can use the software and share it with as many person he / she likes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, as an open source adopter, you can clearly see many advantages and some not so good points. The advantages definitely outweigh the pitfalls and you should certainly consider trying open source solutions for 2 months. Those 2 months will let you know if open source really works for you.

But as a business owner, does it really make sense to write your software and just give away its source code? Can you really make a sustainable business out of such a process? We shall see in the next post that it is very much possible to do so.

Should there be an app for that?

'There is an app for that'. Almost every user who uses a smartphone, especially an iPhone, has heard of this famous catch phrase made famous by Apple in 2009's World Wide Developer Conference. Why was the line so catchy and why did it become so famous? We have to look at phones before iPhone to analyse it.

The situation before the growth of apps

Before iPhone hit mainstream along with its iconic App Store, where one could get hold of apps to practically do anything that could be done on a smartphone, the ecosystem of app development and hosting it on a central repository managed by the phone makers / phone OS makers was very fragmented. Most of the time, the development environment was too complicated, it was very unwieldy to make a custom app and hosting the app for download was mainly the responsibility of the developers themselves and it was upto good SEO for an app to be spotted. Nokia did try to ease matters by introducing the Ovi Store, but anyone developing for Nokia using their Symbian platform and later on J2ME would agree that making an app needed a lot of skill, time and patience. The system was not as easy as iOS and Android are today. Blackberry's platform was slightly better, but their focus on business meant that their apps were centred around business and productivity tools and there was nothing by way of games or apps like Instagram, Whatsapp or any of the Google Apps in the Blackberry World. In summary, user who bought a Nokia or Blackberry were generally content with (or let us say, stuck with) the apps that were pre-installed in the phone during purchase.

With iOS and Android, Apple and Google focused exclusively on building an ecosystem where developers could easily build apps with powerful tools and APIs and upload them to the respective app repositories (App Store and Google Play) in a jiffy.

App explosion

Fast forward to July 2015. According to the numbers in statista.com, Google Play has 1.6 million apps and Apple App Store has 1.5 million apps. Now surely we cannot do a million and a half different things with a smartphone. Chances are that a typical user uses only between 2 to 15 distinct features on his/her smartphone. Typical uses would include Internet access, photography, geolocation, bluetooth connectivity and storage on SD card (a feature not supported by Apple anyway). Even if an app were to use a combination of the mentioned features, the number of combinations will run only into a few hundreds. So, it is clear that hundreds of apps are competing against each other over the same combinations of functionality. E.g. there are hundreds of photo snapping and sharing apps, hundreds of apps that deal with bluetooth sharing, etc.

Full-blooded competition

This means that when a company makes a new app, they may be actually competing with hundreds of apps which are achieving the same thing, although with their own set of conveniences and user experiences which draws a certain set of users to their app. But it does mean that those users will also install competing apps and may or may not stay loyal to any of the apps.

In fact, observations show that apart from the pre-built apps, a typical non-techie smartphone user has only 3 apps actively installed and being used from the app store. More techie users will generally have upto 15-20 apps. But both sets of users generally use only upto 7-8 apps on a regular basis, i.e. at least once a week.

With such user choosiness and such an oversupply of apps, the situation looks just like the scene from Finding Nemo where a flock of seagulls are chasing after a pelican to get their bite of morsel.

Cut-throat competition among apps means that they are constantly stuck in a cycle of having to grab the user's attention using marketing, promos and awareness tactics. When a new user wants to install apps, it looks like the apps are shouting out to the user like the seagulls in Finding Nemo!

Why you should care

The situation paints a grim picture for anyone who wants to roll out his/her own app. Is it really such that after putting in so much time and money on building an app, marketing and acquiring users, we can actually wake up one fine morning to find that users are actually jumping ship to a rival? The hard truth is YES. As long as an app is an also-ran among a pool of rival offerings, there is no guarantee that users will stick to the app unless it has something uniquely valuable to offer. And that value has to be really ground-breaking, disruptive and radical for someone to hang around. Or it must have enough fan-following and generate a humongous amount of content currently not being done so by the rivals.

The moment of truth

Companies and individuals must stop and think why they really need an app to achieve their objective. To put the question more specifically and to make things clearer:

What kind of functionality am I introducing into my product that is making me overlook a mobile enabled website and instead making me invest my time, money and resources into making one app per platform, i.e. Android, iOS and Windows Mobile?

What am I bringing into this product such that the convenience of writing a one-size-fits-all HTML5 has to be intentionally ignored and the hassle of writing 3 seperate codebases is the only option to achieve the means?

If your answer is, "Everyone has an app and I do not want to miss out on the mania" or "If I do not make this app and instead make a mobile website, my customers will think that I am antiquated", then relax. You may think that everyone including your customers and share-holders may care if you have an app or not. In reality, they couldn't care less as long as there is a solution that solves their problem and works 100%. It does not matter if it is an app or a website as long as the user has somewhere to turn to as a solution for his/her problems.

Giving HTML5 and responsive web a chance

Apart from the obvious fact that one codebase and one URL will work on any device, be it iOS, Android, Windows mobile, tablets, desktops, kiosks and a lot of HTML-compliant devices in the future, responsive web is super easy to design and code, needing much fewer lines than native code to achieve most tasks. With a plethora of frameworks now available, such as jQuery, Angular, React, Bootstrap, Meteor and Polymer, the feel of mobile web is getting closer and closer to a native experience. 

Browsers are getting faster, HTTP as a protocol is getting more streamlined with two-way connectivity using websockets, HTML5 and CSS3 are matching native apps special effect for special effect and animation for animation.

It would be a mistake not to consider making a responsive website to get a solution up and running as quickly as possible. If after careful consideration, app specific features are needed, then one must consider building an app.

To appify or not to appify

Fear not my friends, after all my lecture, I would like to end this post on a productive note. The following section lists some key functionalities of smartphones. Some of these features demand that an app be made to support them. For others, a responsive website will provide a sufficient and even better experience.

1. Text content editing with fallback offline storage: Think Google Drive and Evernote. If the data is text only, then look no further than responsive web. It is well capable of syncing with cloud to permanently store the data, while at the same time storing data offline just in case the user decides to document his trek from a mountain with no coverage. The only reason that Google Drive and Evernote had to make apps was reason 2, which is coming up.
2. Photography: Alas, on this one, the app wins. Responsive web has not yet found a way to use the camera.
3. Photo effects: Surprisingly, a responsive website is enough, provided photos are uploaded from the device instead of being taken directly from a camera. Pixlr is a good example.
4. Push notification: With the introduction of websockets, push notifications are now supported directly by responsive web. Facebook has integrated this seamlessly.
5. Drawing tools: One look at the website draw.io and you will never consider writing 3 seperate apps to replace your paper napkin diagrams.
6. Geolocation: GPS support has been in responsive web for almost 8 years now, ever since HTML5 made its grand entry. Google Maps has been pushing a pin on the top of your apartment on its web edition for several years now.
7. Sensors: Going for a jog? A swim perhaps? Sorry, a website won't help you here. Sensors are still off limits for responsive web and are expected to stay that way until W3C and IEEE join hands to form some standards on how to interact with sensors via web programming.
8. Shortcut on the phone's home screen: Answering this is a bit spotty. iOS has been supporting this feature for websites off the bat. Their Safari browser was beautifully integrated with their home screen. For Android, since Lollipop and with Chrome's latest mobile version, a website can set up an icon on the Android home page. But, hey wait, what if I love to use Opera. Well, in that case, things start to get tricky. To get the shortcut on the home screen, one MUST open the website on Safari (for iOS) or Chrome (for Android). But once the shortcut is placed, the website can be opened on any browser.
9. Completely offline content: Websites were not made to be consumed offline. Sure, one can always make a webpage with a barrage of links to download content to be viewed even when offline, but apps can be made such that they have offline content as soon as they are installed.
10. Audio / video streaming:  HTML5 introduced the support for playing audio and video without having to use memory guzzling Flash and Silverlight plugins. However they support only open standards and formats such as WebM and some popular formats like mp4, which is good for consuming publicly free to play videos. To play DRM encrypted / licensed content, special algorithms must be used. Their algorithms cannot be plugged into the browser on demand, but certainly can be integrated in an app when it is getting built.
11. Bluetooth: Bluetooth has been the domain of apps for quite sometime. However the introduction of Web Bluetooth and its support on every browser will bring this functionality to the browser. Currently it is a drafted specification and there are code sources for download to implement Bluetooth Low Energy, which is a lower energy version of Bluetooth, more favoured for tracking devices, rather than offering full functionality like file sharing and streaming. Full stack functionality and complete adoption by every browser will take time. Currently only Chrome supports web bluetooth in Low Energy mode.
12. Chat: Chat has been a browser-centric exercise even before the Google Talk era. Players like Yahoo chat and various dating and speed dating sites were websites before chatting apps for the desktop caught on.
13. Features requiring rapid changes: The odds are heavily stacked in favour of websites here. When features are nascent and need to be changed almost on a daily basis, websites can make sure that changes reach the users almost instantly. This is because the codebase of websites is present on the web servers of the product company rather than on the user's phone. With apps, it requires the user to find and trigger the installation of the latest version of the app. Sure, there are ways to force the user to update the app, but all methods have an element of friction and ultimately the user is the one who has to choose to download the latest version. With a website, the user doesn't have to opt to download or install anything. When s/he fires up the website during the next usage, the changes are automatically reflected by the browser.
14. Using protocols other than HTTP: The only way to go is to use apps. Browsers are inherently built to work on HTTP protocol. Period. For using any other protocol such as peer-to-peer networking like torrents, a browser simply does not have the support. A lot of protocols can be supported by a layer of HTTP, e.g. Email, streaming video calls, such that the browser can work with the HTTP layer and those HTTP messages are then converted into the underlying protocol messages, e.g. SMTP for email.