The student may flunk biology, but at least he'll be the first to know who won the Bulls game. And so on. Think about resources that you regularly visit on the Web. Maybe every morning you check the David Letterman top ten list from last night, and before you leave the office you check the weather report. Think about that time you wanted to print an entire document that had been split up into individual files, and had to select Chapter 1, print, return to the contents page, select Chapter 2, etc.
Browsers are for browsing.
They are wonderful tools for discovery, for traveling to far-off virtual lands. But once you know what you want, a more specialized client might be more effective for your needs. If you don't know what the Web is, you probably picked up the wrong book. But here's some history and background, just to make sure we're all coming from the same place. The inspiration behind it was simply to find a way to share results of experiments in high-energy particle physics.