Netscape Founder Says Web Browsing Innovation Dead 895
mattOzan writes "Marc Andreessen told Reuters today that browser innovation ended five years ago (which would put us at about Navigator 4.5 beta -- what was so innovative about that? The "What's Related" button? Beatnik integration?) "Navigation is an embarrassment. Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons -- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser." Well, pass me the NDA and tell me what they were!"
Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Whats wrong with current browsers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Effective (Score:2, Interesting)
some quick ones (Score:5, Interesting)
cookie management
forms information management
tabbed browsing
css-compliance
that little bar that appears in moz on some pages with the extra links like "up" and "email" or whatever
mouse gestures
obviously, the browser has not been just sitting still.
Re:He can't pass them on (Score:1, Interesting)
are you kidding man, he practically made http a household name.
even if he did nothing else, he did something that impacted human kind.
what have you done lately?
Re:some quick ones (Score:2, Interesting)
How I'd improve bookmarks (Score:5, Interesting)
I can think of a couple innovations... (Score:5, Interesting)
Refinement is what I'm looking for, web browsers are a commodity now.
From the tone of the interview, Marc sounds like he's a bitter man now.
Re:Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Funny how innovation stopped right then (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean Opsware [opsware.com]. Marc's a nice guy though. We're his next door neighbors and used to see him quite a bit across the street at Hobee's [hobees.com]. He's probably still got his table there....
Bad browser "innovations" (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember seeing an interview with Mark Pesche, the dude who was regarded as the author of the VRML spec, and he was going on and on about how cumbersome it is to keep track of URL's when we could be navigating in a 3D space for our documents....
Could you just see that? "Come visit Jiffy Lube on the web! Start at the Origin, go down Street 1 until you come to the big purplish billboard, bear left and continue through the pasture... go under the spaceship and then head 4 spaces east and you can't miss us!". And this is more intuitive than "www.jiffylube.com" because... why?
I'm sure that, of those 18 improvements to the browser, many or all of them promised to "completely change the way we think about browsing". However, like VRML, it's not necessarily a change for the better.
And in 1844... (Score:4, Interesting)
Correct. (Score:4, Interesting)
Just look at how many sites are an index.html that's just gluing together a pile of Flash and PDF from that point on. Anything else is just a pile of php/asp/cfm as a hacked frontend to SQL - just like Slashdot.
Javascript is great for popups, and Java is great if you want to write a version of the code per browser version, but Flash and PDF have won the battle.
Even Google figured this out, 90% of the stuff I search for ends up being
Re:Not true. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, Anderson's opinion is quite accurate if perhaps somewhat blunt. Just consider how narrow the subset of graphs, representing a user browsing the web that our current browser history model encompasses. Even the simple case where someone browses a few links deep then decides to go back a few links and browse a different topic looses quiet a bit of information. That difference alone affects browser usage patterns.
Personally, I haven't seen any significant change in the browser navigation system for even longer than Anderson is suggesting. Certainly there have been some nice incremental changes to UI and encoding schemas, but navigation itself has been untouched for... well, longer than I care to remember.
Some features I would like to see (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, I think there is scope for a far better builtin download manager. I know Opera and Mozilla have rudimentary download managers, but these lack obvious useful features: drag and drop; downloading of all matching patterns; scheduled downloads and others.
Slow and minor innovation (Score:3, Interesting)
Tabbed browsing? I was really pleased when I saw that. Then I got a feeling of deja vu. Hmmm... Let me drag the Windows toolbar to the top of the screen. Then let me do open in new window for pages. Hmmm... I can click the tabs, and jump instantly between different browser windows! I can even add an URL toolbar to the toolbar and make it two lines high. The only new here was restricting it to the browser.
What I see as the few great new features since the web started are:
1: URLs
2: The back button[1]
3: Formatting
4: Forms
5: Cookies
6: Inline images
7: Bookmarks
8: New browser windows
9: User customizable fonts
10: (just kidding!)
[1]: The back button is quickly getting obsoleted by mice with a back thumb button.
IMHO, the ground breaking innovation stopped a LONG time before 1988 (Netscape 4.5b). I still use Netscape 4.0 quite often, and it's really not that different from Mozilla/IE/Opera. It shows the same as these browsers do with only minor differences, and works with the great majority of web pages.
This makes me think "has it really been five years since that? Why so little change?"
The only new I see now is Java trying to become an application browser -- the new Netscape Navigator for applications. I don't think Sun'll succeed, but we'll see...
Regards,
--
*Art
So what's your next big idea for Mozilla, then? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pause over a link and you get a small preview of the click-through content in a hovering dialog a la tooltips. Implement in links using a small frame, perhaps...
So Mark's thrown the gauntlet down. What's your idea?
How about some intelligent articles? (Score:2, Interesting)
Card catalogs, books, EVERYTHING. It has nothing to do with interface development or evolution, its because we're human and how we think.
Stop posting articles about idiots spouting off.
it's a browser. it can only do so much (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why IE is stuck where it is? (Score:3, Interesting)
A Microsoftie ("thrall") at work says I'm a Zealot because I don't use I.E. I try to explain that Mozilla is quite simply, just better, and provide examples from tabs, to low numbers of security issues, to standard compliance, to pop-up blocking, cookie management, etc. He doesn't buy it.
When we see each other in the hallway, he says "Zealot!", and I say "fanboy!"
can we ignore this guy already? (Score:5, Interesting)
Andreessen should be a pariah in the open source world. He abandoned an open source project (Mosaic & NCSA httpd) in order to compete with it in the commercial world. "Competition" in the Microsoft sense of the word: Gain the upper hand in the market then "innovate" so much that nobody can keep up. And, of course, give away the browser free of charge in order to sell the server. When Microsoft finally woke up to the web, Netscape was playing on their ballfield and obviously lost.
Anyway, I'm tired of hearing him and Jim Barksdale whine about the browser market. Get over it already.
Innovation is dead ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I could argue that Napster, Gnutella and Kazaa are in some way huge innovations for "browsing" lovers, as they do allow you to browse content, even if not through hyperlinks/html. And, why, instant messengers let you browse people !
But instead I'll just say, I wouldn't trade the last version of Internet Explorer for a previous version of it. Or for Netscape 4.5. Functionality, performance and format support have improved. Improved format support means more forms of content (Flash, Shockwave, Java, etc.).
Despite what I said I use not IE, but Avant Browser instead. The reason is that I think it (ahem) *innovates* enough over MS's vanilla offer. MyIE2 is also good looking and functional. Both are free. Both add tabbed browsing, gestures/click sequences, ad blocking etc.
If you use windows try this:
http://www.avantbrowser.com/
Or, take a look at this:
http://www.myie2.com/
How much a 2003 car model innovates over a Ford T is a matter of debate. We still have combustion engines, rubber tires (four of them) and a driving wheel behind a wind shield. But if you were the Ford T chief designer and engineer, and had a big ego, in what side of the debate would you be ?
Re:Whats wrong with current browsers? (Score:5, Interesting)
With that mindset, viewing web pages are the equivalent to turning pages... not many different ways to absorb the content.
There is more room to innovate on the web-design level than with the browsing software. Sounds like he was pissed off because he couldn't reinvent the wheel.
Re:Not true. (Score:3, Interesting)
back
forward
reload
open a link in a new tab
open a blank tab
home (google)
close window/tab
view source
and 4 user defined gestures that open frequented sites (including
add the default click and right click for the context menu gives you 14 functions. Next time you find a 14 function mouse, you let me know, okay?
Re:How I'd improve bookmarks (Score:1, Interesting)
Email me with suggestions/bugs/comments.. I like constructive feedback because it improves 404Browser.
support@404Browser.com
Re:So what's your next big idea for Mozilla, then? (Score:2, Interesting)
i'll agree, for the block (Score:2, Interesting)
-bZj
Re:Bookmarks as files? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's really not that difficult. If a bunch of CS freshmen can do it in 1997, it makes you wonder what is going on with major browser development.
Linearity in a random world (Score:3, Interesting)
So, how do you bookmark that? The sites in and of themselves weren't very interesting until I was able to put everything together and get the big picture about what turns out to be a pretty rare sighting. Saved as individual bookmarks, they would lose the context in which they were viewed. What if that particular session could be bookmarked, and what if I could view the session as a web of links? Then I could start anywhere within the session, recreate the context of the session, highlight nodes of interest, and add to the session itself at a later time.
Now we'd be talking about innovation.
Re:Why IE is stuck where it is? (Score:1, Interesting)
HTML partially to blame, oh yeah, and Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
There's really no way to get desktop features like drag and drop (and don't say DHTML & Javascript...it sucks.)
If Java had been tightly integrated into the browsers, the way we expected when it first came out, then we'd have all the power of a good programming language available, and you'd see pages be able to re-form themselves into applications.
Go the the bank's page, you have a banking app. Go to a music site, you've got a sample player and purchase app. Etc.
Yes, it would have started out slowly, but with good libraries and JAR caching, the commonly needed stuff would be on everyone's machine with no need to download lots of stuff for each application. A missed opportunity.
Re:Why IE is stuck where it is? (Score:2, Interesting)
its crashy and unresponsive way more often than IE
On a Windows box, the best way to browse is to open IE
With:
??
What you say used to be true (or almost true - Opera has been a better browser than IE since at least version 6), but I suspect you haven't used a recent version of Mozilla on Windows. It's neither ugly nor slow (well, Firebird isn't ugly).
Re:Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
And no spyware/adware, and it runs on windows and more platforms.
I guess Andreesen when talking about all the innovations he "had in mind" he meant tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, popup blocking... I guess he was lucky to be in netscape at the time, most of what he did afterwards kind of failed miserably.
Mozilla, IE, Safari and the Mac (Score:3, Interesting)
As a Mac (OS X) user, you should consider yourself blessed as far as browsers go. Apple's Safari browser is good, though its KHTML rendering engine does run into the occasional snag with convoluted (non-standard) content here and there. But the reason I make that statement is the Camino browser (formerly Chimera), also available from http://www.mozilla.org/.
It is fast (faster than Safari, despite Apple's word to the countrary), lightweight, and better integrated with the (by itself sexy) Mac OS X operating environment than any of its competitors.
It does not come with an e-mail client though. You may think differently, but I think this is good. A web browser should be just that - a web browser. That way, you are "free" to pick the mail client that best suits your needs regardless of browsers - and personally, I tend to favor the "Mail" application that ships with Mac OS X (for much the same reasons: lightweight, very usable).
Needless to say, Camino renders pages extremely well (thanks to Gecko); has the set of options that you are likely to care about (like pop-up blocking, per-site cookie policies...) while not overwhelming you with hard-to-follow, busy option screens (like Mozilla and in particular MSIE), and is, like Mozilla itself, Free Software (TM).
Re:Not really... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would you want something so primative as a web browser when you had Hypercard [apple.com]? If Apple had included the ability to link to and run Hypercard stacks from the Internet back in the 80's, the World Wide Web may have been a very different place today.
Of course it's hard to blame Apple for this little shortcoming, as the Internet wasn't even known to anyone outside of academia when Hypercard was being activly developed.
The comments are old (Score:4, Interesting)
Marc's probably pretty annoyed that his comments are getting misconstrued this way.
SuperBrowser: Quake + HTTP (Score:2, Interesting)
I had such high hopes back when VRML was hyped, but it passed on. Why isn't the web going 3D?
browser innovation, yes... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are still issues--multimedia delivery is one, so is effective user interfaces for more-than-web pages (something more powerful than javascript/html forms but not as cumbersome or ugly as java or
For instance, when I'm viewing blog comments, I should be able to expand and contract the threads with + and - buttons (without a pageload), change the threshhold (at least higher, since the data wouldn't neccesarily be there to go lower from the initial state), even mark them read and unread without a form send. Yes some browsers have features that makes this more or less possible, but across the board this stuff should be easy and widespread.
The answer could be more and better client side scripting, or it could be interactive server connections (more robust than http). I personally like the client side scripting idea better, but that's me.
Brian
What?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Adware is usualy bundled with shareware anyway
Ways to make pr0n surfing better (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's some recent innovations, and a few new ideas:
1. Linky (mozdev.org) - Linky lets me select a bunch of links and open them in tabs. Or just open all the links on a page in tabs. Good lord, why wasn't this in Netscape 2!?! Think of all the time I could've saved myself by not having to middle-click on everything.
2. Image Permissions. I'm on a slow link, and doubleclick does nothing but waste bandwidth. Thank you Mozilla.
3. Plug-in Management: The thing that Opera does right. Turning on flash on a site-by-site basis is a good thing.
4. Profitable web browser: The thing that operasoft manages to do that netscape couldn't, apparently.
5. Pop-up control. I used IE for the first time in quite awhile today. Good gods, how do people stand it? Every other browser seems to be better in this department than IE.
And some things that would make browsing better:
1. A better bookmark system. I think the netscape method (a single file) works better most of the time, but I *really* wish I could have my bookmarks follow me everywhere (yeah, I know that there are sites that do exactly that. None of them seemed appealing last time I looked). I also wish filing could be made easier.
2. Better control over saving files. This is essentially a pr0n thing: I'd love to be able to highlight a bunch of stuff, right-click and choose "save all selected...", but I can't do that. Don't know why.
3. Navigational AI. No, I'm not kidding. I see my students hit a new-to-them web site and then have no clue what to do. A browser "idiot mode" and "idiot tags" would be helpful, as would a browser with enough smarts to say "This looks like the link to product support" or "Click here to view cart". There would be some interesting pattern recognition software needed, but hey, what else are we doing with our 3GHz desktop PCs?
4. A text-reading mode. There are decent screen-reading programs in the world. Reading long pages of text (e.g. tinyurl.com/ypc) is a frickin' chore. My co-workers more or less print every page they have to scroll to see. A better experience for a reader might help somewhat.
5. Better "connection awareness". I'd love it if my browser could look at my transfer rates and choose to throttle back on images or display the odd ALT tag instead of making me wait.
Thank goodness for Opera Software (Score:4, Interesting)
- MDI browsing. This is a little better than just tabbed browsing, since you can have windows side by side. It is really convenient to be able to group browser windows together.
- Mouse gestures.
- Rewind and Fast Forward.
- Built-in download manager.
- Status bar that shares screen space with the address bar. (Some people don't like this, but it's only optional.)
- Page zooming.
- Saving entire browser sessions.
- Having a Back button that really truly works as expected! (Always takes you back to exactly where you were.)
Just what I could think of in a few minutes.And why is this bad? (Score:3, Interesting)
In our current society we all seem to have hard-wired relationships we don't dare to investigate.
old -> bad
new -> good
Why is everything old bad, or anything new supercool good without further reasoning?
(For example old europe. Okay europe is old, and we are proud of it! Why does Rumsfield think it's something bad?)
mature/less innovation -> bad
(Okay Linux is not really innovative itself. Unix is longer out there. And does this make it anything bad? It IMHO a supreme product anyway)
american way -> good
etc. maybe you find also some examples.
What I would love to see... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to be able to bookmark a framed site with the exact set of frames I want to see.
Or bookmark a page, but automatically jump three screens down when I select that bookmark.
Perhaps for dynamic pages like slashdots comments, have the option to bookmark-to-cache so I can reliably bring up a specific comment even after it has been modded to oblivion or spilled over to another page.
Session bookmarking like has been mentioned would be awesome too. Sometimes I know vaguely remember when I was at a site or saw something on the web, but don't remember exactly when/where. The history file is helpful, but painful to look through sometimes.
I'd like to see session bookmarks done like this:
Option 1: You click on a "begin session bookmark". Then when you are done, click "end session bookmark". This would automatically record the entire session, in the order and heierarchy you surfed in...
Option 2: You click "begin manual session bookmark". Then you click "Send to session file" for each page you want.
Option 3: You click "Bookmark past" and tell it how far back in time to send your surfing to a session bookmark.
Option 4: Click "Bookmark Future" and tell it how long or how many clicks or whatever into the future to automatically throw things into the session bookmark.
Also, session bookmarks would be able to be given a name, date, or both. And either organized in pure chronological or heierarchical order of your surfing, or alphabetic... whatever.
I'd also add the ability to mix these types. so you could bookmark 3 screens down in a framed page, and cache the current page so you dont' have to worry about it dissapearing tommorow, and send it to a bookmark file for your current browsing session.
Gee... I should crack down on learning programming... maybe implement some of these ideas.
Re:Internet (Score:3, Interesting)
The only significant navigation tool that I've seen was IBM's WebExplorer, that was bundled with OS/2 Warp.. rather than just having "forward" and "backward" buttons, it would keep track of everywhere that you had visited in recent history, in a tree view, and allow you to get back to any point that was still in it's history, very easily. It was way cool.. and has yet to be duplicated in -any- browser.
Browsers should learn from XWT (Score:3, Interesting)
We've been stuck with the same, very limited set of GUI controls for years, and Web designers are resorting to all sorts of obscure DHTML tricks (that often only work on a single type of browser) to render tabs/menus/etc. on normal Web pages.
UI changes != innovations! (Score:5, Interesting)
I love tabs, quite abit actually. But that is not a *browser* innovation. My terminal window has it. Would you say the command line "innovated" because of tabbed windows? I bet you wouldn't.
Popup blocking? That's just a response to popups. One "innovation" to stop another "innovation"? Please.
CSS? not a browser innovation, a standard! My word processing has stylesheets, XML has them, etc.. An improvement is not an innovation, just as not all innovations are improvements. Especially when alleged "innovations" come from other apps.
For crying out loud XChat has had tabbing for a long time. Graphical forms have had them for years as well. This goes for gestures as well. Games have had them for quite some time. Thus, not innovation but merely a UI feature offered elsewhere.
It is true there is very little innovation going on in the browser these days, But mostly because everyone got worried about "backward compatibility" and the fact that browsing was overhyped anyway.
After all, we are talking about wandering or searching a resource for information. How many innovations have there been in *walking* for example?
IMO, much of the lack of innovation has to do with poor shortsighted choices not a part of "browsing".
For example, the effectively flat namespace that is DNS according to Internic. A heirarchical namespace would bring us a vastly different world.
HTML is limited, the flat namespace is limiting. With these two firmly entrenched now, the next true innovation will come from elsewhere.
When the famed dream of bi-directional hyperlinks comes to fruition (if ever), we'll see innovation. When the web is more than just a uni-directional reference, and is more self-organizing, we'll see innovation. When the flat-namespace is busted out, and we move beyond HTML (or flash/shockwave -- after all those arent innovations in *browsing* they are different ways of showing you a pretty cartoon or movie clip), we'll see innovation.
Until then, we are stuck with the sea of flotsam, jetsam, and Innovation Stagnation(tm) that is the current state of the web and browsing it.
Re:OS-level vs. app-level tabs (Score:2, Interesting)
Most people browse in userland, and thus don't care about the technical details behind a window manager.
They sure do care when they get the "Your system resources are running low" dialog box, and they continue to get it even after quadrupling the RAM in the machine, because the Windows 9x resource heap is limited to 65536 bytes for user.exe and 65536 bytes for gdi.exe no matter how many megabytes of physical RAM are available. Tabs are more resource-efficient than windows.
KDE, OS/2 and Windows 3.1 via thrid party apps had multiple desktops long before Mozilla existed
If multiple desktops are so cool, then why have user interface experts working for a major computer company [apple.com] discarded multiple desktops as too confusing?
Re:web browser as gui platform (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, and cars also haven't evolved since the beginning of the last century.
Better hardware support doesn't count, nor does faster cars. One can see more cars than before, design is slightly improved, but roads are still the same to end users and car seats look still the same as they were. Yes there have been small changes in the background...
browser "innovation" (Score:4, Interesting)
We're still busy sorting out the mess and getting browsers to be as standards compliant as possible.
This is a good thing.
smash.
XUL (Score:2, Interesting)
plXPCOM Perl interface.
IOD4 1997 (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not check this out. I just now found this windows version of a beautiful browser that even now is quite nice to use and far more satisfying than the others out there (well lynx I like too).
Also it seems to limit the amount of information you can absorb at a time which is a good thing! And 99.999% of the ads are gone too!
Of course this is 5-6 years ago..
There is plenty of room for rethinking applications, especially in the area of semantic content and broadband access. SGI's Onyx had a neat little demo where you go through 3D aimated hyperspace portals to get to different 3D worlds or applications, I remember one that was a flyover of the Matterhorn and ended up with a Nintendo chip deep inside it (on their Infinite Reality). Most people are finding and publishing content in a 2D, static format for now, but nobody has set anything in stone. If you have cheap connectivity something completely different for audio and video may be useful to people.
At the moment Asia seems to be a bit ahead of the U.S. in connectivity, Yahoo BB (broadband) has been stalking people in front of your local train station and attempting to give free IP phones to everyone in site. As I hold back they have kept getting cheaper, the last one I saw somehow got Snoopy on it. These people also need a good networked application.
Another possibility is the Cavern system from U Indiana. A Cave is a room with 2d/3d video on the walls/floors etc., a Cavern built on the open library can connect two or more caves together. These have also been around for some years now, but there is no reason why there cannot be more creative thinking going on, the only reason I see for Mr. Andreesen's perception is that a lot of the people who could do something about it also have to make a living and it is harder to do both these days. A collaboration space to do this might be a good test bed for the applications themselves. The current Web is plenty fertile for people who want to develop new software, but new hardware makes it easier to get the software into people's hands and get funding to build it.
Anyway Mr. Andreesen is not just a whiner, he's also mega-rich. He could make a foundation which would select and sponsor research projects in this area, specifically to fund groups or producers who can coordinate media artists and engineers. The dotcom investment bubble is over, but nobody has died and fallen off the earth. If he doesn't know anyone I'd be glad to help.
Re:Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, so has konqueror, mozilla, and even the old netscape, ... except that it's not limited to 9 pages ;-)
About the only today's browser that doesn't have a history list that is directly accessible is lynx... ;-)
although still not as nice as IBM's history tree Indeed. History tree. That's what makes it interesting. not just being able to go back and forth linearly, but be able to also re-explore the side-alleys of your browsing history.
He is 50% right (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe not the traditional browser, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that the iTunes Music Store is an innovation. Basically you have a app (iTunes) that is a file manager and player that has the added functionality of purchasing music directly into the app. The engine for that is basically a web browser that has been modified to do specific tasks.
There is the traditional back, forward and home as well as links. But there is also the search, result sets and tree-like views that are well tailored to the application. Sure you could do the same thing with frames, but it is the app, with a browser, that integrates these things and integrates them into the main desktop app with out the use of plug-ins or Active X. All web based delivery of content with out leaving the main application.
It is an innovation of the browser because it is a browser that focuses on a task with out a lot of hassle for users to achieve a taks. In this case searching, previewing downloading, and managing music files. iTunes shows that you can integrate web based content into a desktop's productivity using simple html tools.
This sets up a distiction between apps that use the web and web sites that pretend to be apps. iTunes is an app (a browser) that makes very good use of the web in an innovative way. Watson and Sherlock are other examples of apps that are essentially customized browsers that focus the users on the task at hand. I'm sure there are more examples as well.
Re:Whats wrong with current browsers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Data aware table support, that fully exploits the W3C HTML spec - have to be toggleable of course, on a per table basis. This would let you use rich grid controls to view tables of data instead of requiring the designer to resort to silly DHTML/CSS/JavaScript tricks to emulate this.
Greater awareness of page data in general - type ahead link selection is great, but something like a drop down nav box with all the links on the page would be nice.
Better back/forward history, as the parent mentioned.
Granular control of page sections - basically, expose the DOM to the end user. If I want to collapse a section, I should be able to do that on my end without the web designer needing to provide a JavaScript interface for me.
Yes, I know I could implement all this stuff in Mozilla. Some of it probably even has been. I could even implement it pretty easily in IE (IE exposes alot more functionality that people usually think it does, you just have to know how to look). But I don't have the time. Let someone who's job it is to work on browsers do it.
What has Andreessen done recently? (Score:3, Interesting)
Every statement I have heard from Andreessen in the past few years has involved him shitting all over something.
Meanwhile, what has he done recently?
Dead Wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
Some ideas for navigation (Score:2, Interesting)
For some details, check out some of the papers [ucalgary.ca] by S. Greenberg. (There are tons of other links I had around but I can't find them right now.)
I think the heavy research into this kind of "browser innovation" may indeed have died five years ago. What researchers began finding out then is that people had become very conditioned to the Back/Forward/History/Bookmark behavior provided by Netscape/IE. Any deviation from that made users uncomfortable and confused.
Notice that while Opera, Firebird, and the like have provided some nice advancements, they have not changed the basic behavior of these buttons. Either they (Opera, Mozilla) didn't think about any alternatives, thought the accepted behavior is the best, or didn't think users would accept the alternatives.
It's really inevitable, isn't it? At some point a UI convention becomes so ingrained to so many people, that an alternative that provides 50% improvement is not enough. It would take an order of magnitude improvement to make the masses switch. Basic browser behavior seems to have hit that wall.
Re:Some features I would like to see (Score:3, Interesting)
I run Opera 7.1, and don't see anything like that feature. What it does have is a "smart forward" that will act on LINK REL="next" tags if they're present (it also has the navbar like mozila, not that I ever use it) and if they're not present, it scans the text for the first link starting with "next" or "forward" (and possibly some others) or if the URL looks like it has a sequential numbering scheme, it bumps it. Keyboard-wise it's normally bound to the same key as the history forward key, which overrides the "smart forward" function when you're in your history. So I rarely use it
I wouldn't call that a major leap, just an evolutionary change. But still, Marc is mostly just spouting off on a combination of inflated ego and bitterness. Kinda reminds me of RMS, I can see him in the future mumbling "they all say mozilla in the user-agent. I wrote that. Is it so wrong to want it called Mozilla/Safari?"
Re:Internet (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course not.
What he had in mind was much cleverer navigation, non-stupid Back behaviour (as we all know it today, and has already been the topic of posts on
Yes, tabbed browsing, mouse gestures and other features have somewhat improved the browser, but hardly the way we browse.
What about "browsing trees" representing the different places you've been in a hierarchical manner. A clever browser would learn your habbits, use RSS in a useful, non-sucky (sidebar) way in order to provide you with the data you are looking for, feature a much better bookmark handling, etc.
Type-ahead-find and such are just the beginning of what should be always more efficient web browsing.
Re:1998 - Good Times (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Internet (Score:2, Interesting)
Mostly what Netscape brought to the picture was better implementation of the same ideas (like properly nested tables, the eternal bane to Mosaic's existence). To us, everything else they did (adding proprietary tags, instead of going through the W3C, for instance) was about lock-in. We took the high ground, and of course lost, but at least we felt good about it. It -was- an NSF funded project, after all. We were getting funding pressure for competing with a commercial entity. We didn't want or need to 'win', we just wanted and needed to improve things. That was our mandate.
When Microsoft came into the picture, and NCSA bowed out, the browser war ceased being about new ideas, because Microsoft is all about parroting everybody else. There was no innovation rivalry anymore, and the well dried up. Now the only source of input was the W3C, which is not nearly as nimble as a development team that's delivering new code every 5 weeks.
Re:Internet (Score:3, Interesting)
Read and learn:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/andreesen
Yeah, he and his team were only responsible for stupid stuff like:
- inline images (Mosaic)
- clickable links (Mosaic)
- the Back button (Mosaic)
- progressive display of images as they download (Netscape Navigator 0.9)
- SSL (Netscape Navigator 1.0)
- tables (Netscape Navigator 1.1)
- cookies (Netscape Navigator 1.1)
- JavaScript (Netscape Navigator 2.0)
The web would be much better without all that stuff, right? It'd look just like Gopher, and there'd be no web applications. No Amazon, no eBay, no e-commerce at all. Just client-server apps, X11, and Citrix. Awesome!
BTW, just because some people abuse a technology doesn't mean it was a bad idea. I guess you'd say email is a bad idea because there's spam, and images are a bad idea because there are banner ads. If so then by all means JavaScript is a bad idea. Never mind the fact that it significantly improves the usability and performance of forms with client-side validation, which is what it was originally designed for.
Yes, they added some ugly hacks (frames, FONT, downloadable fonts) and misfeatures (blink) but on the whole, they drove browser innovation in a good direction. Only when MS leapfrogged them with IE 4 (little more than a Navigator clone) and then "cut off their air supply" with IIS did Navigator stop being the most innovative browser.
Color of links should vary with its age (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd like that the color of visited links could range from the the color defined for visited links to the color of _un_visited links in proportion to the time passed since last visit.
Go to a page with links, some visited, some not.
The links unvisited would appear, say, red.
The links visited 1 minute ago would appear, say, yellow.
The links visited 7 days ago would appear orange.
The links visited 15 days ago would appear, say, almost red.
Read about it in the Mosaic documentation [uiuc.edu].
Vote for it. Code for it
Re:Internet (Score:1, Interesting)
Isn't the History list kinda similar to this?
No, not at all. History list is, as its name says, a flat (unstructured) list (apart from sort order). A tree shows you the relationships between the pages in your history (you started from this page to arrive at that page)
I use IE's History quite extensively; it tells me what pages I loaded based on name, date visited, etc. Not a tree, no, but they are grouped by domain. And (IMHO) it kicks Mozilla's History's ass, but then just about anything would.
Please keep your pro-Micro$oft blathering to yourself. And if you absolutely need that cheque from Micro$oft to make ends meet, please consider earning your money in a more honorable way: toilet scrubber, stripper in a bar, telemarketer, ...