“Kiosks are actually old animals,” said Cody Catalena, chief technology officer for College Station, Texas-based NetNearU.

“Even before the Internet, you had a ton of kiosks that did a multitude of things. It’s just that most of the information became stale very quickly.”

Browsers fight that staleness by bringing the benefits of the Web to kiosks. They make it possible for kiosk vendors to automatically update content and features and to monitor kiosks for performance, security and usability issues, he said.

IE everywhere

Chances are good that anyone browsing at a kiosk during the past year used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE).

“Microsoft Internet Explorer is the most used browser,” said Halldór Sigurjónsson, chief technology officer at London-based Degasoft, makers of the Kudos kiosk management and application design software.

“It is the best available Web browser with widest customer adoption. Also, IE provides a great programming interface for developing content and to integrate into other solutions.”

Vancouver, British Columbia-based Info Touch Technologies Corp. also uses Internet Explorer, along with its own kiosk-specific operating system, called SurfNet Premiere, on about 8,000 kiosks. “It’s the most advantageous for us,” said Joseph Nakhla, Info Touch’s chief marketing officer. “That little browser can be the vehicle to unlock the power of that real estate and deliver ROI (return on investment).”

However, what users see on an Info Touch-designed kiosk’s touchscreen is quite different than what appears on the screen of a PC user browsing the Web. Gone are the signature toolbars and other hallmarks that make up IE’s graphical user interface (GUI). In fact, kiosk users can’t really tell they’re using a browser at all, Nakhla said.

“We completely customize the browser for the usage of our clients,” Nakhla said.

Developers can use kiosk application software to make their own versions of IE. Degasoft, for example, uses Kudos, along with IE, to develop browsers for kiosks, Sigurjónsson said.

Changing the GUI

Though many users are already familiar with a browser’s standard graphical user interface (GUI), with its buttons and icons, on their office or home computers, keeping the same GUI on the kiosk would have some drawbacks.

On a PC, users navigate with a mouse or a keyboard. On a kiosk, this type of navigation would cause them to spend more time searching that some alternatives. Designers change the interface so that customers can easily find what they want, said St. Jones, kiosk application designer and vice president of new business development for Atlanta-based Netplex.

“What we need to do is repurpose a Web site to have large buttons and simple navigation,” Jones said. “People should be able to get where they want to go in three clicks.”

“Clicks” in this case refers to pressing a button on a touchscreen, not clicking with a mouse. Jones said that the browser should contain large, easily identifiable icons for maneuverability so that users unfamiliar with keyboards and computer mice can intuitively and quickly find the information they need.

For example, if a customer in an electronics store uses a browser and has to spend 30 minutes to find information on a digital camera, the store could only expect to have about 16 customers in the kiosk during an eight-hour day.

“In a retail environment, you want to (find information) in three minutes,” Jones said.

In addition to changing the GUI, programmers must design the browser so that it limits or disables a customer’s ability to roam the Internet, provides increased security, installs memory monitoring and reports on the health of the browser, Sigurjónsson said

Who needs browsers?

While it appears every kiosk uses browsers, not all software developers are sold on them. Apunix, for example, makes software for application-based, rather than browser-based, kiosks. Sylvia Berens, vice president of the San Diego, Calif.-based company, said that browsers are more prone to software errors than so-called application-based kiosks.

“Application-based kiosks often render the graphics in a richer manner and faster than Web-based content. Web-based kiosks are often subject to longer display times because each page is rendered each time it is encountered,” she said. “Application-based kiosk content can be cached, and so repaints are almost instantaneous.”

Berens also contended that the use of browser technology has been “oversold” to end-users and that problems with browsers have contributed to failed kiosk projects.

There are also plenty of instances where not having a browser has advantages. NetNearU’s Catalena said that non Web-based applications, like money order printing or ticket printing, are served best when a browser is not used.

Alternative browsers

Browsers designed specifically for kiosks can offer features that browsers designed for PCs can’t. First Wave Inc., designed its own browser, called Kiosk Communicator, that runs on top of the MacIntosh operating system. First Wave founder and chief executive officer John Glitsos said that IE and Netscape are designed primarily for text, not multimedia.

“If you’re looking at Netscape of Explorer, you’re starting with an HTML text engine,” Glitsos said. “We started with the position that we were going to deliver very, very rich media, including full-screen, full-motion video.”

He said that kiosk-specific browsers have less waiting time between pages. “Delays of over three or four seconds exasperate consumers in a public place. They don’t bother people at home in their pajamas, but in a public place those kinds of delays, well, people think that the kiosk is broken.”

Glitsos said that he trusted the market to decide whether modified versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape or home-grown browsers were better for kiosks.

“We’ll see which one has the better return on investment, then we’ll all know,” he said.