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The Internet Chrome

The Browser Company's Darin Fisher Thinks It's Time To Reinvent the Browser (theverge.com) 128

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Darin Fisher has built a lot of web browsers. A lot of web browsers. He was a software engineer at Netscape early in his career, working on Navigator and then helping turn that app into Firefox with Mozilla. Then, he went to Google and spent 16 years building Chrome and ChromeOS into massively successful products. Last year, he left Google for Neeva, where he worked on ways to build a browser around the startup's search engine. And now, he's leaving Neeva to join The Browser Company and work on Arc, one of the hottest new browsers on the market. Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI. It has a sidebar instead of a row of tabs, offers a lot of personalization options, and is meant for people who live their computing life in a browser (which is increasingly most people). CEO Josh Miller often talks about building "the internet computer," too, and using the browser as a way to make the internet more useful.

Fisher has been an advisor to The Browser Company for a while, but Monday is his first official day at the company as a software engineer. Ahead of his new gig, Fisher and I got on a call to talk about why he thinks browsers are due for a reinvention -- and why he thinks a startup is the best place to do it. The answer starts with the browser's defining feature: tabs. Fisher doesn't hate tabs -- in fact, he helped popularize them. But he hates that using a modern browser involves opening a million of them, not being able to find them again, and eventually just giving up and starting all over again. "I remember when tabbed browsing was novel," Fisher says, "and helped people feel less cluttered because you don't have as many windows." But now, "even when I use Chrome," Fisher says, "I get a bunch of clutter. At some point, I just say, 'Forget it, I'm not even going to bother trying to sort through all these tabs. If it's important, I'll open it again.'" Browsers need better systems for helping you manage tabs, not just open more of them.

The best way to improve the browser, Fisher ultimately decided, is to just start from scratch. Arc is full of new ideas about how web browsers can work: it combines bookmarks and tabs into one app switcher-like concept; it makes it easy to search among your open tabs; it has built-in tools for taking notes and making shareable mini websites. The experience can be jarring because it's so different, but Fisher says that's part of what he's excited about. "This is not stuff people haven't talked about before," he says, "but actually putting it together and focusing on it and thinking about the small steps that go a long way, I think that's where there's so much opportunity." Fisher likes to compare a browser to an operating system, which matches with The Browser Company's idea that Arc isn't just a browser but rather an iOS-like system for the open web. "It has task management UI, it has UI for creating and starting a journey, but there's so much more in between," he says. What the iPhone did for native apps, Arc hopes to do for web apps. Fisher says he's interested in improving the way files move around the internet, for instance, finding a better way than the constant downloading and uploading we all do all day. He likes that Arc has a picture-in-picture mode that works by default, pulling your YouTube video out when you switch tabs. All these make the web feel more connected and cohesive rather than just a bunch of tabs in a horizontal line.
The Browser Company also plans to reinvent the internet browser for mobile, too. On mobile, in particular, he says, "there are so many opportunities because the starting point is so archaic."

"He's vague on the details of his plans -- and The Browser Company hasn't really started working on a mobile browser yet anyway -- but says that's a big focus for him going forward," adds The Verge.
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The Browser Company's Darin Fisher Thinks It's Time To Reinvent the Browser

Comments Filter:
  • by louzer ( 1006689 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @10:42PM (#63017743)
    I am willing to bet 1 satoshi that this is going to be a privacy violating, content censoring, adware.
    • Boss of browser company tells us it's time to "reinvent" something that already works.

      Film at 11.

      • What the browser needs... is to not change! Stop it, put down your keyboard. It's working and if you touch it it will break!
        Get rid of the bonus incentive to add new and pointless features. Fix bugs or go home.

        • by caseih ( 160668 )

          Not only stop adding pointless new features but stop removing useful features.

          • Windows build changeset notes: "Remove customer configuration item that was accidentally enabled."

        • by hawk ( 1151 )

          >What the browser needs... is to not change!

          other than encryption I'm scratching my head to come up with any changes since the various versions 3 in the 90s that have actually improved things.

          OK, spiking flash.

  • Won't fly on iOS (Score:4, Informative)

    by exomondo ( 1725132 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @10:46PM (#63017749)

    Apple is even more restrictive than 90s Microsoft when it comes to browsers though, they won't allow third party browsers on iOS so it's pretty much dead in the water from a cross-platform perspective unless they can build it as a skin atop the WebKit version that Apple ships with the OS.

    Maybe if the concept is demonstrated in a wildly successful way on Android then it would force Apple's hand...seems unlikely though.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @11:27PM (#63017801)
      Always wonder how Apple gets away with doing that given that they have a 50% share of the phone market. And then I remember we stopped and forcing antitrust laws decades ago
    • Thatâ(TM)s funnyâ¦I have Chrome and Firefox as apps on my iPhone. Granted, I never use them. I do prefer Chrome over Safari on my Mac, however.

      What they donâ(TM)t do is ship those apps with the OS. And, I think they require the use of WebKit. But, this is a far cry from saying Apple doesnâ(TM)t allow 3rd party browsers on iOS.

      • Re: Won't fly on iOS (Score:5, Informative)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @08:06AM (#63018479) Homepage Journal

        What they donÃ(TM)t do is ship those apps with the OS. And, I think they require the use of WebKit. But, this is a far cry from saying Apple doesnÃ(TM)t allow 3rd party browsers on iOS.

        Apple does not allow 3rd party browsers. They only allow skins which add some superficial functionality on top of their browser. Sure you have those apps on your phone, but they're castrated, shitty versions of themselves because that's all Apple allows on their device. (It's not yours, clearly.)

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • As long as it's based on the system Webkit, then in general I assume it would be permitted on iOS unless it breaks one of the many other rules Apple has for apps.

      • Except that you don't have those installed, because Apple does not allow competing browser engines on iOS [open-web-advocacy.org].

        You have Chrome and Firefox skins for WebKit installed as apps on your iPhone. But they aren't actually Chrome or Firefox as they are on literally any other operating system.

      • Thatâ(TM)s funnyâ¦I have Chrome and Firefox as apps on my iPhone.

        I was trying to be as clear as possible when I said: "unless they can build it as a skin atop the WebKit version that Apple ships with the OS" which is what Chrome and Firefox "apps" for iOS are, it's not the actual Chrome or Firefox browsers running on iOS.

        But, this is a far cry from saying Apple doesnâ(TM)t allow 3rd party browsers on iOS.

        No it isn't because the actual browser engine is still the Safari one, the UI is just Chrome/Firefox. So for example Chrome/Firefox on macOS are different browsers to Safari such that they can support things that Safari doesn't, WebGPU for example. Howev

    • by dbialac ( 320955 )
      That said, from screen shots, I don't see anything compelling. It just seems like a web app connected browser or put another way, another way for web apps to steal my data. I'll stick to desktop apps.
  • I thought I would try it for the novelty factor.

    Went to download, only... they demanded my email address, for which, in return, I would not even get to download it, but rather they would let me know when it's "my turn".

    I won't ever be giving them a second chance.

    • by jobslave ( 6255040 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @11:20PM (#63017789)

      Read the summary. It's a closed beta. If you don't provide an email how are they going to contact you? Maybe wait for a public beta. Then if asking for an email your complaint would be valid.

      • by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @08:09AM (#63018487)

        except the link that leads to that form explicitly says "Try it for yourself" and not "Join the invitation request queue". for a sw that's not even in public beta that's starting with the marketing bullshit pretty darn soon, and it isn't even good marketing bullshit because it actually frustrates expectations.

        on top of that, macos only? these guys are trumpeteering way, way too early.

      • It's a Chromium reskin. What merits a closed beta? For that matter, what merits an article before we see if they bother to put anything in it worth mentioning?

        • No idea. To me its just another browser and won't go anywhere so I'm not even bother looking into it unless it gets traction. Just read what was stated in the summary about a closed beta. I rolled eyes when I saw the headline about reinventing the browser. Sorry no new browser completely rewritten from scratch using new concepts is ever going to take the world by storm. (Are you guys over at Opera listening?). What will happen is Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari will take cool new features and implement

    • I thought I would try it for the novelty factor.

      Went to download, only... they demanded my email address, for which, in return, I would not even get to download it, but rather they would let me know when it's "my turn".

      I hope you used a fake/one-off address.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I won't ever be giving them a second chance.

      We won't give you a second chance either. You've outed yourself as an impatient idiot who doesn't bother to even understand what's going on before jumping to a conclusion.

  • It's up to the user (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mononymous ( 6156676 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @10:53PM (#63017753)

    using a modern browser involves opening a million [tabs], not being able to find them again, and eventually just giving up and starting all over again.

    Not me. I have a vast hierarchical collection of bookmarks I've been curating since 1999. I rarely open more than 8 tabs at once.
    Browsers didn't make it any harder to use bookmarks when they added tabs, and bookmarks are still the best way of keeping track of pages to go back to later.

    • I don't even do that. There's a handful of sites I bookmark but I don't pay any attention to the order because modern browsers will search your bookmarks when you're typing in the address bar.
    • by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @11:38PM (#63017813) Homepage

      Same here. Close your goddamn tabs, people.

      I have about 6-8 on the desktop and none to four on mobile.

      I'm all for keeping stuff in the browser, and eschew appy app shit on the phone. Some people might find an innovative UI better but I'm doing fine.

      • Same here. Close your goddamn tabs, people.

        Huh? Why? We have tab groups and other ways of organising our space. No need to close anything, we can just minimise them for quick access later.

      • eschew appy app shit

        Eschew.app is the appiest app of all apps! Appy app shit is the future of apps!

        Apps!

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Exactly, software design can't make a person be organized. I imagine the type of person that has a million tabs, gets overwhelmed and then starts over is the same kind of person that has thousands of emails in their inbox. Also the same kind of person that uses the Downloads dir as their do-everything working dir. If you have so many tabs open you can't find what you want, that's a _you_ problem.

    • by Reeses ( 5069 )

      Since 1999? How many of them are even still active?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I only use bookmarks for stuff I want to access quickly. They rot too fast and require too much effort to organize. If there is some useful information on a page that isn't likely to change, I clip it into a Joplin note. Joplin then becomes kind of like a bookmarks organizer, with tags and with a copy of the content in case it gets removed.

    • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @07:01AM (#63018335) Journal

      Exactly this.
      I read the article thinking "what sort of chaotic brain opens so many tabs at once then gets 'overwhelmed' and shuts them all?"

      Does he use tabs in lieu of bookmarks? Is that how he thinks this is supposed to work?

      • Exactly this. I read the article thinking "what sort of chaotic brain opens so many tabs at once then gets 'overwhelmed' and shuts them all?"
        Does he use tabs in lieu of bookmarks? Is that how he thinks this is supposed to work?

        I assume what gets overwhelmed is Chrome leaking memory like a sieve, and the browser crashes, then when you try to reopen those tabs you get a thousand, resubmit the form prompts or hit back on your browser. Bookmarks stopped being as useful when the world went to dynamic AJAX page
    • If you rely on bookmarks instead of downloading the content, you will find that 90% of those 1999 bookmarks lead to the land of 404.

      • Out of my few hundred bookmarks, there are maybe 20 that point to the same URL they did in 1999.
        Of course, most of them aren't anywhere near that old.

    • by nmb3000 ( 741169 )

      bookmarks are still the best way of keeping track of pages to go back to later

      Yes, and no. I have lots of bookmarks going back many years too, but aside from active and topic-specific ones (longer YouTube videos I want to watch later), they tend to fall prey to "out of sight, out of mind".

      What I really want is a middle-ground between bookmarks and tabs. Sort of a "work in progress" collection that functions both as a list of of pages that I anticipate returning to soon as well as a TODO list and visual reminder. This is both for short-term (news articles and Slashdot pages to read

    • I don't even bother with bookmarks or favorites. I maintain a single HTML file with tables of links and have it set as my homepage. I share that single file across all my computers and browsers, so every machine in my home has the same links. If you don't have any fancy styling, it's a piece of cake to maintain, and you can add as many comments/omissions to the file as you like, too.

      I never use tabs, either. I shift-click on links all the time, and use one of the programmable keys next my my left shift

  • by Anonymous Coward

    We have plenty of browsers. However, a browser designed for the user privacy is rare. Just a single f-ing setting of not displaying videos unless the site is allowed, and videos be clicked on to start playing is beyond the capability of today's popular browsers. Similar with actually doing stuff against browser fingerprinting, or even allowing malicious code to escape a browser context and run as the user.

    So far, the best browser entity is a virtual machine with Firefox in FireJail, where you can dump th

  • Forced onto Chrome at work due to a dependency on Endpoint Verification but would be willing to try something new. Been hating my browser (and computers more generally) for many years. Whatever happened to getting some better tools for working with our information? Something maybe inspired by the work of Bush (MEMEX), Nelson (Xanadu), or Englebart (NLS). Or maybe I'm expecting too much from a device which is just a fancier TV.
    • by lsllll ( 830002 )

      You want to try something new, which has no ads? Try a Gopher [wikipedia.org] client. No intrusive ads, and information at your fingertips.

      • I used Gopher back in the day... though had some access to the web as well through a bbs interface to use lynx (though still not sure why the admins of the LAFN disabled the ability to go to specific URLs). But Gopher was still mostly a read-only medium as far as I was concerned back then but there were certainly interesting things to be found on it or WAIS servers. Most of my early experience on the internet came through a course I took via listserv: Patrick Crispen's Internet Roadmap [archive.org]
  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @11:07PM (#63017771) Homepage Journal

    You'd have to turn off the Internet and replace it with a different network to get people to change.

  • by GFS666 ( 6452674 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @11:19PM (#63017787)
    Mr. Fisher has obviously not learned from computer history. Remember Netscape? Remember when they redesigned/reprogrammed their entire browser from scratch? Remember how long that took and how they lost a massive amount of market share due to their inability to quickly change? Did Microsoft use underhanded tactics during this time? Yes, but Netscape screwed itself by their decision and handed the browser market to Microsoft. The history on this is clear: If you want to do a new design, fine, do it. But continue to support your old product, keep it current and be willing to chuck the "new and shiny" if it is not working out. This is classic example of software people wanting to do something because it's "new and shiny and COOL" rather than dealing with cold blooded business decisions
    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      At the time that Netscape was invented, there was only one other graphical browser of note: Mosaic. Mosaic rendered graphical images, which was a big deal at the time, but was otherwise little better than lynx, the text-based web browser that preceeded it.

      You can't really fault Netscape engineers for building it from scratch, as the only other option was objectively inferior.

      Fwiw, Internet Explorer was originally based off of the Mosaic codebase, which Microsoft had licensed, and came out the year *A

      • by Scoth ( 879800 )

        I think they're referring to the transition from Netscape 4.x to what ultimately became Gecko/Netscape 6/Mozilla/Firefox/etc. There was a big delay there where Netscape 4.x was getting increasingly creaky and getting left behind by IE4 and 5 with regards to things like multimedia integration and DHTML and all that other shiny flashy stuff that led us to where we are now.

        Netscape lost years in development hell trying to massage the existing 4.x codebase into something new and when that was clearly failing, r

    • Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
                      -- Kurt Vonnegut

    • It didn't help that Netscape 6 was a total piece of shit. I vividly remember how slow and buggy it was. When all the Macintosh people were uninstalling Netscape (which came with MacOS) and started moving over to Microsoft's browser, you know something really went wrong.

      To all the people who insist that Microsoft killed Netscape, they clearly don't understand their history. Netscape killed themselves -- just like Mozilla is doing today.

  • Desktops and mice are still the backbone of most business and productivity applications. It's time for a state-ful GUI markup standard that's CRUD/Mice/State/Desktop-friendly so we don't have to download screwy JavaScript libraries that are buggy and have long learning curves.

    List of missing or ill-defined GUI idioms per current browsers. [reddit.com]

    • It's time for a state-ful GUI markup standard that's CRUD/Mice/State/Desktop-friendly so we don't have to download screwy JavaScript libraries that are buggy and have long learning curves.

      We'll end up with a GUI markup standard where the implementations are all written in Javascript

  • Um. What's their business model?

    • Instead of trying to redesign the browser UI, perhaps they should make it customizable. Add a Visual-Basic-6-like designer with plenty of use-able samples. People picked up VB-classic real quick. The excessive obsession with "responsive" ruined simple WYSIWYG ui designers. If it's personal usage, responsive isn't that important. (MS also was obsessed with cloning Java instead of making a UI-friendly language. Java sucks at UI, e-bureaucracy.)

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @11:34PM (#63017811)

    Web browsers are free, and have been for a couple decades. No individual is going to pay for a web browser, and I expect it's highly unlikely that Google, Microsoft, or Apple would buy a browser company either. So what exactly is the business plan here? And what venture capitalist was dumb enough to bankroll it?

    • by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      The usual one is to auction off the right to be the default search engine.

    • I think the idea is to create a browser that eventually digs enough market share out of an existing one, then you hope that they buy you out so that they can get your market share, your users of course dump the browser instantly because the reason they took up your browser is exactly that it's NOT one of the big ones, then you start over.

      Sure, it's not gonna make you a billionaire, but it's a steady income.

    • double-clicking its icon. Or tapping it, if I'm on my phone. Either way, a browser starts up.
    • For what it's worth, Apple basically already did buy a browser company. It just wasn't so much a company as an open source project.

    • I would pay for a browser that was very focused on usability and privacy.

      I'm getting tired of managing my adblockers and script blockers, and fiddling with them for best usability, I'd pay a small monthly fee for someone to maintain these blocklists for me

  • People use tabs to store the page state. Figure out a better way to save the state and the tab problem goes awy.

    • That's not really what they were meant for. I routinely have a dozen tabs open and all of them need to actually DO stuff, I use tabs to avoid having 12 different windows open. Or at least I used to before browser makers decided to turn them into a "stateful bookmark" instead of an organizational tool.
  • by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @11:55PM (#63017833)

    Or is it just a heavy fork of the Chromium engine with a funky new UI?

    • This is the best question.
    • by Cinder6 ( 894572 )

      It's the latter.

      I got my invite yesterday and tried it out. Honestly, it's pretty neat and pretty slick. It's got some cool things going for it on the UI. I'm almost certainly sticking with Safari, but I wish them well.

  • by ClueHammer ( 6261830 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @12:01AM (#63017837)
    Something that address all privacy concerns. Does not collect any data all. Does not allow any tracking what so ever. Blocks any and all advertising attempts and launches a DDOS attack on the advertiser and the advertising company! And I guess it could serve web pages also.
  • Guy joins bagel startup, thinks it's time to rethink bagels.

  • Fisher’s stance is not exactly controversial, and few would disagree with the idea that there are bound to be better ways to organize a browser. But it’s really hard to make changes to any app once it hits a certain level of scale and maturity. Just look at Safari on iOS, Fisher says: when Apple moved the URL bar from the top of the screen to the bottom, users freaked out. “But why was [Apple] motivated to do that? Well, you’re on a phone, and your thumbs are at the bottom, not the t
    • Putting the address bar at the bottom is not better, because now you can bump it accidentally while trying to do something else, like scroll or select some text. Use gestures for forwards/back and you won't have to touch it so much.

  • ... using a modern browser involves opening a million [tabs] ...

    Why? There's limited screen 'real estate', there's limited short-term memory and there's limited task-switching cognition. Unless someone is opening a tab for each (book) page, that's nowhere near a "million". This is people thinking they can have everything waiting and immediately start working on something else: In short, enabling narcissistic delusions such as "doing something" == "being productive".

  • Firefox has that shit covered, and almost everything they do is irritating. What we need is for someone to just focus on making a browser that works and doesn't have a bunch of shit shoehorned into it. As it is, there are several features built into Firefox that should be extensions, but already aren't. We do not need another browser that tries to include every feature, we have it and it's getting steadily worse.

  • First, fix CSS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @06:48AM (#63018321) Homepage

    Before anyone can really re-invent the browser, we really need to fix CSS. By "fix" I mean "throw most of it away". CSS is no longer a standard, it is a set of ever-changing modules, which offer periodic "snapshots" of their current state. The overall complexity is insane. Behavior is poorly specified. It reminds me of the old MS Office document standard: The standard was whatever Office actually did, bugs and all. CSS is much the same: the behavior is whatever the current engines do (and sometimes they do different things).

    As far as TFA is concerned: Their browser, Arc, is a skin over Chromium, adding different ways of handling favorites and such. Vivaldi does much the same thing, but also includes a lot of privacy enhancements, which Arc apparently does not.

    I find it interesting that there was a German Wikipedia article about Arc, but it has been deleted. About the only technical information available is from beta testers on reddit. Why is that?

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      CSS is indeed farked. CSS is either rocket science or spaghetti. To non-experts, both are the same. I wish browsers had better direct- coordinate options so that the server side and/or custom JavaScript could get one a better layout engine rather than wrestle with CSS. I'm not saying take away what CSS does, just make other options easier. (The existing coordinate system is especially screwed up for text. It's why HTML can't render PDF's faithfully without drawing letters at bit level.)

  • Chrom* (Score:4, Interesting)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @07:02AM (#63018343)

    >"The Browser Company's Darin Fisher Thinks It's Time To Reinvent the Browser" "The Browser Company and work on Arc, one of the hottest new browsers on the market. "

    Yawn, is it just another Chrom*, still leaving Google in control of what defines and ultimately the web, like all other multi-platform browsers except Firefox. Diversity in only the UI while leaving all the important stuff firmly locked down in a mono-culture and following whatever pseudo-"standard" Google wants to force on everyone is the dangerous "IE-Only" path.

    If you care about privacy, security, and actual standards, then support non-Chrom* options before none are left.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    There is absolutely nothing new about Arc. It is just yet another skin for Chromium, leaving Google in charge of monitoring your browsing habits and selling your personal information to the highest bidders.

  • When I read the title I thought: great! At last someone is noticing the browser has become a bloated piece of garbage that rivals against the OS.

    Until I kept reading and I realized it was about keep doing the same stuff but with a different UI experience.

    I like how the article tries to sell this hottest new browser, Arc, which is so hot and exclusive that it's invite-only beta software. What? I can't test this beta Arc? Oh! It makes me even more intrigued and wanting to use it!

    Sarcasm aside, Arc is
  • (I work for Microsoft in an area unrelated to Edge. This isn't paid shilling, but I cannot expect you to take my word for it.)

    Edge has vertical tabs, tab search (ctrl-shift-A), tab grouping, collections, and (enterprise only public preview Edge v106+, not generally available yet) "Workspaces" which let you define a browser window you can share with a team (Additional data) [microsoft.com]. There is also a tool for generating Citations in preview buried under the more tools menu. It's a 10/10.

    It used to have (pre-edge chr

    • Instead of all that stuff no one asked for, how about they bring back a usable menu bar.

      • Interesting, I haven't heard anyone ask for that. Do you mean like the file - save as and edit - refresh menu?

        All the functionality is in there, it's just tucked under the ... menu (Alt-E).

        • No, a full horizontal menu bar along the top all the time and while MS is at it they could go back to Ui school and ditch the metro/mdl/flat/"modern" (for 1980) UI that makes it hard to distinguish controls and data.

  • People who invent things get bored. That doesn't mean that we should keep reinventing the wheel for the sake of arbitrary change. Browsers are fine - fix the security and make speed improvements but the paradigm as a whole doesn't need to be changed - focus that energy on something more useful.

    Its sort of like a hardened soldier during peacetime. They never can accept that the fighting is done.

  • So his idea of a better browser is stuff it full with the features I don't like which is why I never move to Chrome or Edge.
    • He worked on Netscape, Firefox, and Chrome. Of course his idea of a better browser is to build in a toaster oven and a Keurig machine - that's exactly what each one of those browsers did over the last 30 years.

  • Apple came up with a multi-tiered filesystem component, Bendo?, which was to be used as a CORBA based app platform, OpenDOC?, which was to allow users of the platform to create content with different types of data which was rendered by modules pulled of the network. The user picked the vendor components they preferred but defaults were also available to viewers of the data.

    Think like word processing where you'd have a test editing component doing standard font, paragraph, layout with another component being
  • An article that starts by announcing that somebody wants to "reinvent" something, is just blowing marketing hot air trying to make their take on something seem cooler than the competition somehow.

    So basically:
    - Move the tabs to the side
    - Combine bookmarks and tabs
    - Note taking feature

    Oh yes, and it "feels different."

    Does that about cover it?

  • If it is not broken, don't fix it. There is not a lot to gain anymore because modern browser UIs work well. Well, maybe the always slow child "Microsoft" has some room for improvement, but even they have mostly caught up and only break things occasionally these days. (In the browser, that is.)

    Hence this whole fake hype is entirely self-serving and nothing of real value will be in the offer.

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