A Peek at AT&T's New Browser, Pogo 239
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica takes a look at Pogo, a browser from AT&T with new features like a 3-D history and bookmark view. The browser's currently in a private beta and Ars' comments aren't all necessarily glowing — particularly in the areas where performance is concerned. 'It requires Windows XP SP2 or later or Windows Vista, and its minimum hardware are surprisingly steep: a 1.6GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a video card with at least 256MB of VRAM. Seem like a bit much for a web browser? It is, and as we found out, these requirements posed some major challenges for us during our testing.'"
Not surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
Bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine by me (Score:3, Insightful)
It's pretty clear that this is intended for the home user with a nice new 2008-9 computer, who doesn't really run much else. So from that point of view, the requirements are probably fine, and at least it lets them actually use the computing power that they have. Other people have other options, nothing lost.
Uh, and RTFA? You must be joking.
Eye candy and Apple's success (Score:5, Insightful)
Pogo seems to be along the same lines. But where Apple's eye candy is functional, the Pogo eye candy looks like flashy for the sake of flashy. The 3D UI looks nice, but it's about as functional as Vista's Windows-Tab app selector.
I don't particularly like Apple, but they do seem to have strong design concepts. The design follows the function in their products, as far as I understand. But Pogo looks like they implemented it because the technology was cool, not because they had some difficult problem to solve.
Spoiled developers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Eye candy and Apple's success (Score:3, Insightful)
Fancy light shows with expensive glitz (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
History and bookmark handling are not scaling well to modern use of the web.
They were designed for a much smaller Internet - back when Yahoo was a comprehensive catalogue of the web, and you could honestly bookmark a short list of all your favorite sites.
Anyone who had to go through the browser history after a long week, to find 'that link that had some information but I cannot find in google again', has experienced this first hand.
All the links look the same, all your searches get in the way, etc.
Anyone who has had a few dozen disposable bookmarks by trying to avoid the history search also has experienced this first hand.
Bookmarks lose their value as they accumulate, and reality is that you often cannot know the crucial link will be crucial until after the fact - after you got another piece of data. Specially for technical documentation.
Pogo seems to be addressing two major usability problems that exist today.
At this point, I mostly consider those to be non-existent browser features by now. Repeating an Internet search is typically more time-efficient.
Now, I don't really think painting it all in 3D really helps - but what they seem to be trying to fix are real problems.
Re:Biased review... (Score:3, Insightful)
But you're right that it's not completely fair to definitively judge beta software in terms of speed and performance. But I don't think it's horribly unfair to make some assumptions based on what you see, nor to run some quick tests to see how something runs on more "reasonable" hardware. I'm guessing that the majority of computers out there do not have 256MB+ stuck on their video cards, and Ars Technica seems to be skeptical that AT&T will be able to squeeze enough performance out of their software to make it useable on more common hardware. It's certainly not wrong for AT&T to release software like that, but it's also not the best way to make your new web browser popular.
Re:Eye candy and Apple's success (Score:3, Insightful)
I also use an Apple Macbook all the time (at home).
So, which one has the more impressive graphics? I've got to say, Apple. It's hard to pinpoint what makes OS X "feel" so nice, but it is definitely something with the graphics.
Aqua's feel is more "solid". I don't know how to explain it, except that moving a window around the screen actually feels like you're moving a solid object around. In Aero and Compiz, the compositing engine indeed makes those Windows feel more solid than in, for instance, XP or Ubuntu without Compiz. But both still feel like they're drawn on the screen; they don't seem to be as "real" as in Aqua.
The same can be said in general about the effects in Aqua vs. Compiz and Aero. And again, I really do like Compiz... I wish there was as much configurability available in OS X.
Re:2GB of RAM??? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean seriously. 1GB is still a perfectly reasonable amount of ram. I can run 80% of modern games (GAMES! We're talking Call of Duty 4 without lag here) and my system isn't up to spec for this WEB BROWSER! And the default response is, of course, 2GB isn't that much. I mean, no one has less than 3 right now right?
Sometimes even those of us who love technology and play computer games can't afford an upgrade (and before you talk about how cheap ram is, my laptop won't take standard ram, and has 2 512 cards right now. It would be ~$60 to upgrade to 2 gigs, and I'd have to either have a tech out or send it in. Yay Laptops) No Web Browser should require more RAM than Call of Duty 4. Ever.
rice browser (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no taste for accounting.
Re:Biased review... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to start a flame war, but security is really the least of my reasons for choosing Firefox over IE.
Firefox is faster, more standards compliant, has way better functionality and flexibility due to extensions.