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Netscape Founder Says Web Browsing Innovation Dead
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!"
a sore loser to me...
Browser innovation died with the rise of spyware/adware/etc. That caused browser innovations to be used against the end-user, so the innovations are negated.
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Fortunately, his mates that did are still working on browsers...
All together now: WASHED UP
Yeah, right.
It just happens to coincide with the time he left Netscape to go start his own failed company LoudCloud.
5 years ago was a great time, though. Good times.
I have been pwned because my
They seem to work fine. If someone can think of a better system for navigating the internet, yay, but I can't think of one, and am efficient with this one.
www.Opera.com -- Don't tell me that browser innovation is dead. Nowadays I go nuts when I'm on a computer with only IE. Mouse gestures are the second coming of Jesus, I tell ya.
In "internet years." Next thing he'll be saying "When I was a kid, we have 256 colors, and we liked it! And only 216 of them were palette safe and that was even better!"
What about tabbed browsing and mouse gestures? Opera is still innovating with dozens of features. Now if only pages would render properly on it.
The truth is, that Netscape stopped all innovation at 4.5.
The rest of the world moved on, and they STILL don't see that.
Bookmarks, back and forward buttons are FINE, the real innovation is in the content, and the display of said content.
CSS, Macromedia Flash, PHP, etc are all great web innovations that continue to push the envelope.
Just because natural selection weeded out netscape doesn't mean the rest of the world stopped innovating.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
People don't like major changes to the way they do things. Once web browsers got popular, the way they are used for the most part couldn't change. People are used to the toolbar buttons doing specific things. Besides, Mozilla isn't a UI, it is a way for displaying web content. He has to admit that the display of web content has developed over the past years. If he doesn't like the UI, open a mozdev.org project to start a radical new one. If I remember correctly, such a project does/has exist/existed.
Microsoft have got the market, they don't need to do any work to keep it, so why add furthur inovations to IE, no reason at all, theve even held back on full PNG support, well the work doesn't need to be done so why do it?
And everyone emulates IE....
popup blocking
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.
Well, I'd say that the browsers actually adhering to standards instead of doing whatever they feel like seems like an innovation... of course, adhering to standards means you can't implement every bright idea you get, so yes, it slows down the rate of change.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I like to think of some web browsing items that have become refined. Tabbed browsing comes to mind *prepares to be attacked by anti-tabbers* I don't think you can separate the browser from the protocols that the browser renders. Thus, if the browser is really just a rendering too and information manager, it does it's job well. Maybe the problem is we haven't fully utilized the protocols available and thus a feeling of stagnation has taken place.
Must've been that new fangled Back/Forward buttons I read about a while back. They show a thumbnail of the pages you can go back and forward to! Isn't that such an improvement over the way things currently are?!
That's because 5yrs ago, no one knew what to expect yet, there was "no limit" thinking, tons of internet businesses were "popping up"....you had to think it would promote new thinking, new ideas.
Though I think that yes, fundamental concepts are out of the question and probably best left unchanged, I have to disagree that innovation is completely dead. Whenever something makes using the Internet easier and more enjoyable, I consider that innovation.
Mark's disappointed at the way Netscape turned out (bought by AOL, the anti-nerd internet company, and market share in the single digits, thanks to Microsoft).
Hey, Mark, driving a car hasn't changed significantly in about 100 years, guess why? BECAUSE IT WORKS!! I like the forward and back buttons just fine, thanks very much.
Another one: Bookmarks. How could they change? They're just places you go all time. A browser should always have these, just like a radio should always have presets. Are radios bad because they 'still have presets'?
Finally, Mark is sad because he hasn't really done anything impactful (is that a word?) since the browser. Yes, Mark, you're a one-hit wonder, but it was one hell of a hit! Don't be down on yourself, d00d.
/.: why the hell am I here?
"Navigation is an embarrassment.
I think what he meant was "Navigator is an embarassment."
Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons -- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser."
Well IE is sort of better at this, in that favorites are individual files, so you can use the filesystem's find function to search (nice when you have 1000+ bookmarks).
And I guess he hasn't seen Opera's gestures?
well, word processing hasn't changed all that much either in the last five years.
Really Mozilla is still available. If he has better ideas then he is still free to develop them himself or push others to do it. Browsing is a mature concept now. It doesn't need to constantly change.. that'd make it hard on users. If he has ideas though I'm sure people would listen.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The death of web browsing innovation happened when Internet Explorer was released with Windows.
Now you've got me bummed out again. I guess I'll go read "IT" again.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
I'd let the browser keep track of sites I visit frequently, and generate it's own list of bookmarks for me. Sometimes I'm too lazy to bookmark things, or more accurately, to organize them well. IT'd be nice if the browser did that. Maybe Bayesian bookmark classification.
Nothing ... I think that's the point ... that was the first evidence of stagnation. Compare NS4.5 navigation to Mozilla 1.4 navigation to MSIE 3 navigation to MSIE 6 navigation and you're stuck with essentially the same model for all this time.
... damn I am trying to remember the earliest and I can't ... it started with a "D" or "Q" and was developed by the folks who made a very popular BBS terminal program ... humbug, sorry, I usually like to have my facts in line but the memory is fading) so while it is VERY nice, it's not truly new. And pop-up suppression isn't an aid to navigation, but a method to sanitize the code from the remote site.
And before people jump up and down about CSS and XHTML, remember that Andreesen was talking about browser navigation not layout technologies or other areas that are dominated by W3C.org.
I will mention that I think tab based browsing and the suppression of pop-ups have been two major boons to my browsing. However, I saw browsers with tabs back before IE 2.0 had come out (back when non-Netscape/IE/Opera/KHTML browsers were often integrated with your Winsock communications stack
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
why reinvent the wheel?
bookmarks work, the back button works (granted I dont use the forward button to often)
Standards are a GOOD thing, especially if you want people to use your product.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
How about tabbed browsing (I know it's not everyone's cuppa but...) and cascaiding style sheets or the super back button in Safari or popup ad blocking? These are all worthwhile IMO.
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.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
As far as I can tell, the web really hasn't evolved that much either(not counting the browser). We are using the same protocols and delivering basically the same types of information that we did 5 years ago. Sure we have flash and other funky plugins to spice things up, but the backbone is still the same. How are you suppose to innovate when the set of building blocks you have to work with haven't changed? Sure you can mix them up a little and get mouse gestures and tabbing and such, but you need new building materials to work with to innovate on top of. Once we migrate off the current version of protocols that we so fondly call the Internet, and open things up some more, I'm sure we'll start to see this innovation.
-my other sig is your mom
web browsing innovation makes Netscape dead!
"Marc Andreessen told Reuters today that browser innovation ended five years ago."
In the same breath,
"Reuters told Marc Andreessen today that he should have ended five years ago."
What's up Marc?
The article starts off wrong, and continues on from there to just reek of "I'm not there, so nothing good could *possibly be done*".
For starters, Marc didn't co-create Mosaic.
See here
Second, Mark didn't add any innovations to web browsing himself, either.
Lastly, he wasn't the "brains behind netscape".
Nobody reported to him, except his secretary.
His only job was to run around playing poster boy for investors.
You mean to tell me developers have nothing else to improve?
1.) How about downloading 8 million different versions of java.
2.) How about getting java and macromedia applets etc all working the same.
3.) Damn html looks different on every browser nowadays.
4.) How about stop pointing fingers at M$ and opera and fix your **** up, so we can have a decent alternative.
... ever heard of Mozilla? Mozilla firebird? They beat the pants off ANY Netscape, and even the lastest IE. Bookman109 This sig will self-destruct in 3, 2, 1 ...******
This sig will self-destruct in 3...2....1.....KABLAMMO!
When was the last innovation in the way papers are printed? Or books are read?
Or imagine the CEO of a chair factory (with loosing market share) complaing that the whole market is damned because there isnt any innovation and all people do is sit down on their products?
What features does a browser need?
-It has to view webpages
-it has to run your average computer
-it has to be user friendly
only the last thing has seen any innovation at all the last 5+ years. Sure, webbrowsers support new file formats, ect, but this is just maintainance.
And even userfriendlyness has only seen (imho) tabbed browsing and type ahead find.
Of course everybody can imagine some kind of totally new cool super geek way to share information using blabblabla, but the programm to access this wouldn't be a webbrowser anymore, because the web are html pages linking each other with embedded links to media files.
And im quite happy that there hasnt been any bigger innovation, because it is a hint that the programms are mature enough to do their task without NEED for innovation.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Say for example, some one wants to 30 thousand rows of data, but it is described in Schema. How in the world is the browser going to handle that? Should it load the assembly remotely or compile it? If it compiles it, how are you going to reliably manage the process and maintain responsiveness? Should you launch a new thread to compile the assembly and save it locally? What happens if the schema is dynamic and may change? There are still a ton of questions about using browser for very dynamic applications that haven't been solved. I could go on and list a couple dozen things I've seen people try to do, but most people with hardcore web development experience know better.
I guess when people finally start to discover the browser is not well suited to this type of applications, people will wake up and do the right. Choose the right technology to solve the problem.
Marc Andreesen is a bloody idiot. Excuse me while I go read the article now.
IIRC, there were no tabs in NS4.5, and tabs are the thing I enjoy most in modern browsers. Then there is the search fields in the toolbar, very cool, plus Opera's location bar prefixs, I love being able to type 'g innovation' or 'a domain:au news' in the location bar and have a google or alltheweb search come back.
And some of the innovation is coming from web page developers rather than the browser, some java applets are getting very nice. Robust, functional etc.
And then of course there is XUL, which is IMHO brilliant, but likely to die. To be able to turn the browser into another application with a markup language is way beyond cool.
In short, I think Marc is spitting sour grapes.
>>
I am the director, and this is my movie
IMHO he's right, although I don't think NS 4.5, was the cut off point for such innovation. What he's talking about is large and dramatic innovation, not add-ons and great expansions (like Tab's, Gestures etc).
But this isn't necessary a bad thing, everyone who uses the net is currently used to using a web browser and its heuristically defined layout, back, forward, reload, home and stop. It doesn't really need (currently) to be changed, the same applies to the controls of a car, the way a book works or even mobile phone interfaces. It works this way, billions of people use it such and changing it would have to be for dramatic purposes.
It doesn't stop us refining it though (again, Tabs, Gestures), just like a car (ABS, Sat Nav, Power Steering etc).
I don't want any crazy wacky shit in my browser damnit. Give me Lynx or give me kernel OOPS! I don't have time to mess around with graphics candy browsers and desktops. I do all my work in console, because that's how real Unix guru work. I wish they concentrate on make Linux better OS than worry about graphic candy game-ladden mentality. For girls and crap! Who needs them anyway, I'm gonna go finish coding this stuff so I can play D&D. And no I never kissed a girl before (and I'm 31) but so what? I'm root!
The pr0n button! Why wade through all those annoying popups?
This guy reminds me of old crones reliving their glory days, whlist doing nothing productive in the meantime.
The browser has matured, and by quite a bit. His statement is analoggous to saying all innovation in word processing stopped with WordPerfect.. heck, maybe with WordStar 4. The days leading to Netscape 4 vs IE 5 were about development of the core browser standards, and of html itself. Now that we've learned to walk, it's time to get running. Future innovations will look to improve on other areas, like rich content, forms and security. Even on the interface developers are showing that new things are yet to come.. Mozilla's tabbed browsing is an excellent example, and though Black and White spin-offs involving gesture navigation didn't quite take off, i'm sure there is improvement still to be made.
Except for, you know, some minor things like browser support for the DOM (which is huge), CSS (which is huger), XML, XSLT, and XHTML.
Or maybe he's just talking about the UI side, where we've seen absolutely no improvement whatsoever. Except for tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, integrated search bars, and popup blocking (though back then, popups weren't so much a problem).
Which is to say, really, that he's wrong. Sure, browser development is arguably slower now than it was back in the Navigator 1.2 Perpetual Beta days, but that's always the case -- the mad rush of innovation has to slow down after the low-hanging fruit is plucked. It certainly hasn't stopped, though.
What do you MEAN there's no more innovation? I mean, take a look at all those clever spyware programs that can pop up 34 windows in a matter of seconds.. now that's innovation! Actually, I think he's right... browsers just accomplish the same basic function, with a few new added things (Flash, mainly) Although, I see a lot more innovation in Mozilla/FireBird than in other browsers... It seems like innovation is dead because a single browser totally dominates the market.. everyone is content and doesn't know any different, so young minds that would grow up to innovate something new never think about 'reinventing the wheel'.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Opera 7 seems pretty innovative to me.
Has tons of prepgrammed gestures, has a "learn gestures option." Works will all programs, totally customizable, only 120 kb in size.
http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/
Things like the sidebar, tabbed browsing, popup control, mouse gestures, are not "innovations." They are details.
Hows this for an innovation: Using a new language called "html" to view images and text like a page together with "hyperlinks" that connect to other "pages"? That's the level of innovation that we should be thinking about, not just bullshit window dressing. Creating the World Wide Web was an innovation. Instant Messaging was an innovation. Web-Cams and Email are innovations because they change the way we live our life. Tabbed browsing changes the way we browse. See the differenced?
- XML - Web services - Massive development of new languages as PHP/ASP connected with DBs. - GPRS and UMTS and use on mobile hand devices - connectivity with applications Sure that, you cannot do major innovations everyday on a product widely used since some years but there are still innovations, mostly on server side and not on the browser itself, it is true. It has just reached a point where people will think that innovations are just normal and you can't easily make something that everybody will be staring at amazed. But just by browsing some websites and how you can setup a dynamic portal easily, even if the browser itself has not changed much more (functionality-wise), the contents and the functionnalities that you can browse/use with it have changed alot.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
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.
Mod the parent up. It is the simple truth.
Fire up Nutscrape 4.5 sometime. You can still download it. You'll need to select the proper language from the builds... something most of us haven't had to do for several years since i8n is now standard equipment in modern browsers. That's all that is needed to see how far off this washed up has-been is. Just because he wanted to turn Nutscrape into a TV, and that miracle hasn't yet occurred, doesn't mean "innovation" stopped.
The rest of the world moved on, and they STILL don't see that.
It is astonishing.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I have this mental image of my cursor giving a web page the finger, but that doesn't seem overly innovative, so I'm probably wrong.
Henry J. Ellsworth said, "I assure you that my resignation from being commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, is really of no great concern. Mankind, has already achieved all of which it is capable. There will be no more inventions requiring patents."
SIGFAULT
WHat about "Mouse Navigation" in Opera. I think that it's genius how it's integrated and I can't imagine a Browser NOT having "MOuseClicks"
www.opera.com
Mike
I always thought that the backward and forward buttons aren't very well suited for a web. I thought one could have a browser that, as you browse, keeps a little picture of a graph of the recent links followed, so that you can jump directly to a different branch, and don't have to traverse the whole tree up and down.
It would work something like this:
google search "best web browser arround"
google lists a list of web sites. On the side you see a single node.
You click on "opera". On the side you see a node linked to one node: node->node
You click on "features. Now: node->node->node
Now you want to see something about netscape. Click on the first node in the graph. You are back to the google page. Click on "netscape". Click on version 3.0, click on features.
Now the graph displays:
node->node->node
\->node->node->node
Now you want to compare these features to the features of opera. You just click on the last node in the first subtree.
And so on....
Don't you think it makes more sense?
And it would drive all the javascript programmers, who don't even want you to use the back button, crazy - as a bonus!
He's just about right, isn't that about the time PDF and Flash happened? Both of which are far better then HTML/Javascript for content.
.pdf now days.
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
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
In many ways, Marc is right. Although, I still look
foward to a weekly raid on the Mozilla nightlies,
though. I get a kick out the creeping improvements
that make Mozilla the greatest browser.
What would really make the browser better is to
integrate a better forms. I'd be cool to have
the widgets as in QT, GTK, WxWindows, MFC, etc.
It's be cool to have apps like XMMS or Open Office
served up as HTML.
That's funny, I had him pegged as one of the few optimists in the IT world, in contrast with doomsayers like Ellison, Grove, Negroponte, etc. Maybe he's mulling a return to the browser wars, taking over or forking Mozilla for instance. For one thing, there should be lots of interesting stuff you can do if XML replaces HTML/XHTML as the data format - maybe the client can be made more intelligent, made more than just a presentation layer.
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.
Mouse gestures are nice, but hard from ground breaking. They're too inaccessible for many people, who lack the hand/finger coordination to take advantage of it. Just like everyone can't do freehand in Photoshop either. Some can, and it's nice for them.
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
Most of the stuff on the web sucks, and google makes it easier, but we can still do better.
I got one word: Hoverlinks. It's a natural step from tabbed browsing.
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?
that using a webpage requires memorization. The widgets on a webpage are quite different than those in most GUIs. They are HIGHLY customizable, and not necessarily themed to match the rest of the OS. This causes major conceptual problems for those unused to computers. The webbrowser is a totally different UI in many ways than the rest of the computer, a UI that can only be learned by memory.
Photos.
This stuff is making me tired. Come on, every single time humans have sets of information, the primary interface funcions are: go forward through it, go back, go to a set place.
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.
Yeah, and innovation for the book died when they created the index, the table contents, and page numbering. As long as the glue that binds the book holds and the ink doesn't run when it gets wet, I'm happy.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Of course innovation died, but that's just the price we had to pay for all of this conformity and mediocrity that Netscape and Microsoft have worked so hard to bring us.
Nowadays it would be a phenomenal innovation if they would just make standards compliant browsers.
"Innovation" much like "diversity" is a stupid, meaningless, feel-good catchphrase. Just because something exists doesn't mean it needs some innovatin'. A web browser is the perfect example of this. Bookmarks ('favorites'), foward, back, stop, and 'go' are all you need. Sure, you could stick a calculator in there, or customized 'skins' (probably the single dumbest 'innovation' in the history of computing), or maybe even a content-spellchecker (so you can see all the spelling errors in someone's webpage), but the bottom line is it doesn't change the functionality. Fix bugs and make it run as fast as possible. Once you reach that goal (ideally it shouldn't take too long), leave it alone. Maybe innovation ended 5 years ago because the web browser was just fine back in the days of Lynx. Oh I forgot, leaving it alone doesn't make money. Never mind.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Of course it works, and it's optimum given the limitations of the medium, but why should that stop "innovation."
We wanna change shit, dammit!
I like Pete Seeger's definition of "sophmoric." The itch to be unique.
There are an awful lot of sophmoric developers out there, and they're producing a lot of sophmoric software.
Please note that the word "sophmoric" is derogatory. Software that's "unique" and "innovative" isn't a good thing. Software that's A Good Thing is a good thing, even if it's the same old shit.
Sometimes especially if it's the same old shit. Even if that puts some of your jobs at risk.
KFG
With HTML 4.0 being in use for this many years it's good to see somebody doing something about it. Central is supposed to be the ultimate, ditch-the-browser web-app interface.
All the luck to them!
But it's apparent that the innovation is gone. Microsoft has said that they will no longer develop IE as a standalone browser (and IE hasn't really changed since IE4).
Konqueror is a grouping of tools similar to IE but they are focused more on standards compliance.
The only real innovation that needs to happen is movement towards complying with W3C standards. Everyone in the web development industry would like that novel innovation of not having to develop web sites that work in only a set of browsers. Or, even worse, gimping their web sites so that they render correctly in all web browsers.
Marc Andreeson needs to step away from the microphone and just admit he was little more than an average young programmer with an average piece of software that just happened to appear at a kind of golden conjunction of the times. Not unlike Bill Gates selling a DOS to IBM... The subsequent difference between the two men and their companies and their careers reflect Gates' ruthless drive and determination and Andreeson's lack thereof.
Money flowed like water.
Sushi was free (or a negligble percentage of the money we were raking in).
Jobs were everywhere.
You could get a job without any experience.
You could get a job without knowing what a computer was.
Slashdot was interesting.
Scrappy upstarts thought they had a chance at unseating Microsoft.
Astronomical hiring bonuses.
Stock options were above water.
Funding for any damn fool idea was available for the taking.
Lots of tech was new and it was possible to get in on the ground floor.
2. Inline image zooming
3. Right-click dictionary lookups
4. Automated (possibly encrypted) proxy chains
5. Less feature bloat
Ok, I guess #5 pretty much invalidates the other 4.
Well IE is sort of better at this, in that favorites are individual files, so you can use the filesystem's find function to search (nice when you have 1000+ bookmarks).
Oh, I hate that one-file-per-bookmark idea. You aren't allowed to call the bookmark whatever you want -- why did they disallow characters like '?' or ':', instead of BASE64-encoding them or something? And these days it's not so bad, because most people are running FAT32 or something better, but back in the day there were a lot of people running FAT16, and on a 2GB disk partition, each bookmark used up 32KB of storage! Yikes!
I'd rather just have a non-sucky UI for finding inside the bookmarks file. (I've just started using Mozilla Firebird and so far the bookmarks searching seems pretty good.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
"You visited http://clownsex.org. Perhaps you'd also like...
http://sex.com
http://clonesex.org
http://clownsontop.com
http://clownpenis.fart
http://kuro5hin.org"
Just take a look at Opera.
They've made some huge leaps ahead of most other browsers, and They haven't slowed down yet.. there is more to come.
Especially in the mouse gestures and multi level browsing.
Don't loose heart guy.. your view of the world might be dull.. but there are some REALLY good, developing ideas out there.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I'm serious. It's ironic that the "end of innovation" coincides with his leaving Netscape as well as Netscape's doomed 4.x series piece of shit^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbrowser. Before that, "innovation" was Netscape ignoring the W3C and making up new "standards" every other week.
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.
Do you have ESP?
...because the number of software patents alone in the 1990s would have given him a heart attack.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Of course it hasn't, last I checked we were still using a mouse and a keyboard as computer-human interfaces. The basic Point N Click GUI hasn't advanced much in what? 15 years?
We have back and forth and bookmarks etc and they stay around cause they are both recoginized and understood by web users annnd it just works.
If netscape had done something drastic at 4.5 and redid the navigation, even if it was better, IE would have slaughtered them even quicker by sticking with the back and forward buttons.
Let's not get carried away, KISS is still the rule (or it should be), we have the mouse and keyboard think how they best work with the user and wait patiently till there's something 1)Better 2) Adopted by the masses and 3) No it's not the PowerGlove. Until then I think navigation in browsers is fine.
Last note, tabs are cool I like them.
-- taking over the world, we are.
well I'm glad he thinks browser innovation is dead. now how about they start working on properly supporting things like CSS!
So incredibly annoying building a page to perfect standards and having a browser munge it anyways!
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Oh for heaven's sake. If he had "18 different things" in mind for the browser, well, he certainly had the opportunity to put them in.
Ironically, the last true innovation in browsing, IMO, was created by Microsoft: the Trident object model coupled with client-side script. Or possibly an object wrapper for the browser so you could embed IE in your executables.
You know you're hurting when Microsoft is out-innovating you in your own backyard. Sing us another sad song, Marc. Only this time, make it about the opportunity you squandered.
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
That quotation has been posted before about everything involving inventions or innovation and always someone replies with the proof that its not true. I guess this time its my turn make the same old reply - but - try this link http://209.130.50.107/resource/archives/wow-duell. htm for now. Its been posted here before but makes for interesting reading.
I could just summarize it here: The quote about inventions no longer requiring patents appears to be false.
....maybe we just like it like this? Geeesh. Some people!
Maybe we've perfected it and have moved on to other important things like perfecting spam, and NP complete.
We have more or less roughed out what we all want from a browser. We like the back and forward buttons, etc. We are comfortable with them.
I suppose he's shocked that after decades of research, cars still come with a steering wheel and a gas pedal, instead of something futuristic.
Now, we not only have things like tabbed browsing, but we have more subtle things that are still nice. For example, in Galeon (for Linux, at least) you can click on the New Tab button with the middle mouse button instead of the primary one, and it will open a new tab with the URL from the selection buffer. So now, instead of:
0) Select URL
1) Click New Tab button
2) erase URL in location bar (be careful not to select it!)
3) click middle mouse button in location bar
4) hit Enter key to load URL
you can just do:
0) Select URL
1) click middle mouse button on New Tab button
It's not earth-shaking, but I like it.
Now take that one feature, and all the other little tiny nice features, and roll them all up. It may be subtle, but it's progress and I'm happy.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Radial Context Menus + Tabbed Browsing Extensions for Firebird (Mozilla) browser are the most radical leap forward in surfing efficiency since the invention of the browser.
Nothing has come close to increasing speed, efficiency and general surfing pleasure as these two items, combined and tuned to perfection.
Andreesen is obviously majorly deluded, and the publishers of the article are obviously morons.
Your browsing appears inefficent, why not try...
I'd continue but its making me feel ill.
--
othy
What the hell does i8n mean? I can't find a reasonable definition via google.
The best I can imagine is internationalisation, but that would be i18n.
"Innovation ? That, Mr Andreesen, is the sound of inevitability".
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 ?
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Convince ITS to install Mozilla as his primary browser.
Have it set to use the IE skin (which is quite an accurate reproduction).
Or is ITS full of fanboys too?
I tried them for a short time a while back... never understood the attraction. In bog standard IE, if I want to go back, I gesture my mouse up to the top left of the screen. If I want to open in new window, I right click and gesture my mouse to the right and down a little. What's the big attraction in making different mouse movements and calling them something different?
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
no shit, sherlock :p
You could crash Netscape 4 simply by adding a well placed cr/lf in the middle of a complex table. That's damn, er, innovative!
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Flash is currently the best format for animated content on the internet.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
(Please? 0 brings up a good point that "features" can very easily get really annoying)
Though if it were off by default I don't think it would be sooo bad...
If there were no Flash, there would be no Homestar Runner. And that would truly be a sad thing.
did it actually tell us anything?
if my wife asks a question, and I'm not paying attention, and then I answer wrong does it still count
In other news, a Slashdot reader claimed that Marc Andreeson is a whiny bitch and hasn't done anything useful in years.
If he thinks innovation ended at Netscape 4.5, force him to use the web with it. He'll chew his own damn hands off...
Browser integration is not dead! Microsoft works on it everyday. MS constantly innovates new features that crash Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera but provide no value. Innovation will truly end when we can no longer use any browser other than IE and at the rate things are doing it won't be long.
... ) As you can tell I am not the least bit bitter. I hate tools that generate bloated, crappy, IE specific HTML laden with self destructing Java script.
I would ask all the developers out there to support more than IE on your extranets. I am talking to YOU Mr. Webdeveloper in that Fortune 100 company like Ford, GM, Diamler, EBAY (Is Ebay Fortune 500 yet?). Ask yourself this, "Do I really want to limit the web to a Microsoft ONLY browser?" The point of the web was platform independence. I especially love developers who code in Java then create an O/S specific dependency.
Think about this next time you decide to implement a feature that only works in IE but provides little to no value to the end user experience. If we all wake up one morning and find we are living in a "one-browser", "one-platform" world, it is going to be horrible. However, if it makes you feel any better, I fight these battles every year and lose to the developers. Usually the management will wine and say, "it costs too much to develop for two browers" or "but if I can just let developers wiggle the mouse and use a tool to generate HTML they won't have to think and can get my project done faster".
However, web browers in general suck for application development. I think the old mainframe character terminal had better input screen capability than the modern web browers. In fact, if you compare the two they work just about the same (Push screen to terminal/browser from, Fill In Screen, send screen back to server, repeat
The whole "embrace and extend" concept is getting old. Can't we all just get along and make things better instead of creating a fragmented incompatible mess. A company like MS is sitting on piles of cash, the likes of which the world has never seen and instead of putting together a Bell Labs or Xerox Parc they spend their cash on marketing and lawyers. There are so few great men in our age and even fewer visionaries. I was holding out a glimmer of hope for Bill when he took over as chief software architect. So much for Utopia.
"There is nothing new under the sun." -Solomon
You made me feel like a really really old man now, when I was a kid we didn't have no fancy 256 colors. We had 16 colors on a Commodore 64, and we liked it. Btw, I'm 24.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Using files for this stuff is a very UNIX-y way of doing things. Putting them all in one bit formatting database is a very Microsoft-y way of doing things (a la the Windows Registry). Odd that with bookmarks they're backwards.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Blowing half a billion dollars on Act II can do that to a man
Highlights from Opsware's most recent balance sheet:
Additional paid-in capital 501,308
Accumulated deficit (456,734)
Total stockholders' equity 42,950
The deal is with the really worthwhile gestures which doesn't involve moving the mouse at all. I'm thinking about the hold+click-other mouse button gestures for navigating forward and backward. I truly can not see how one can not like that.
The kind that involves grand movement I don't understand.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
How much one has to innovate?
;-)
Should one come up with a totally new thing, like Visicalc?
Is changing colors to a Teletubbies' blue also innovation?
Ive been using Opera for some time and just the other day started to use linked windows. Very cool if you got pixels enough.
Even that ad window in Opera _is_ innovation: it allows free distribution and sustain competition against a monopoly. I dont know exactly why Microsoft is not making money on this, too. Maybe they don't like money...
Bookmarklets (little applets) in Galeon are also something unique: maybe they open the way to something similar to Gimp applets. BTW, ever tried "user layout" in Opera? You can make pages much more readable (or funny-looking).
Also, in Opera, highlight any address which is _not_ a link and you can open it at one click.
Opera also innovates in providing some services at their site. Netscape also did/does this, but browser integration is simply brilliant: try downloading a skin.
Opera has that nifty feature, small-window browsing, for PDAs. Can it be useful when viewing multiple Windows in a desktop?
Have you ever seen a browser which adjusts image gamma? Well, Links and Browsex do this and it is simply amazing if you dont own a Mac or cant do it via hardware.
One last thing, zoom via icons in Konqueror or keyboard in Opera.
Too bad I dont Konqueror or Galeon well enough to point out their unique features...
I could dig up more things... but lets just say thanks Mr. Andreesen for all that work in Netscape, sorry if M$ decided you had to leave business... better luck in the future! Just join opensource and be part of a stronger gang, or in the wise words of Mira Furlans Delenn: "Be somewhere else!"
And, just a honestly friend hint, use Mozilla or Opera. Both kick Netscape 4 and IE 6 asses. Even more so now that IE is being discontinued / merged into the OS.
The biggest 'innovation' I've seen since I started 'browsing' the web circa 1997 is Tabbed Browsing - which just came about. And that is arguably not an innovation in browsing itself. Back then we had instant messaging (and its precursor IRC), e-mail, point-and-click browsing, plugins (a la Flash), FTP (for P2P's precursor: 'leeching'). What do we have on top of that now? Just more crap, and some UI changes. I'm gonna play Andreeson-loyal.
-bZj
.sig
To argue that innovation died back in 1998 is to ignore much of the progress Opera and Mozilla have made and continue to make. Both Opera and Mozilla offer new features like tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking. No, there hasn't been anything earthshattering, but we have seen many refinements of the general idea. The refinements are significant enough, in my opinion at least, to make Internet Explorer or even an old Netscape Communicator seem primitive in comparison. Andreessen's funny assertion that innovation is dead reminds me of a story I once heard (and whose truth I question, but I digress) about some European country that, towards the end of the 19th century, had a government that voted on closing down its patent offices. Why? Because everything that would ever be invented had already been invented. Of course, we would look back on that and think it is absurd. To me, Andreessen's logic is really no different - it is bullish and stubborn. Or, as another reader so aptly put it, bitter.
Okay, so maybe it's true. Maybe there haven't been a lot of earth-shaking developments in the web browser (or word processor) market. But so what? Does it do what we need it to do? Is Mozilla superior to IE? Are more and more people seeking alternative browsers for their unique features? If the answer to all of these questions is "yes," I don't see a problem. You can't force innovation; it has to happen naturally. In the meantime, slow but steady improvement is enough for me.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
Most excellent stuff!
You guys seem to be missing his point. He is trying to say that **innovation** in the marketplace out there has been really minimal. I don't think he is denying any incremental refinements that have been achieved up to date.
#netscape -version
Netscape 4.73/U.S., 04-May-00; (c) 1995-2000 Netscape Communications Corp.
sheesh!
It's not so much that 4.5 was so innovative, it's just that very little in the way of innovation since then has happen.
A browser's job is to display HTML-tagged text and images. There's been no innovation beyond that in several years. Maybe there doesn't need to be.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The problem with web browsers is that they still subscribe to this strange (but easily digestible) idea that web browsing is a linear activity. Forward/back is fine when you're trying to backtrack your way through a session going on now, but what about that session you had yesterday? Wouldn't it be cool if you could somehow bookmark browsing sessions? After all, when you are searching for some piece of information on the web, more often than not all of the links you follow are somehow related to the search. For instance, today I saw a Pantera on the road. Not knowing anything about Panteras, I did a preliminary Google search, which took me to a site about Panteras in general, but I followed several links, backtracked, and followed several more until I came to a few sites in which provided me with an aggregate of the information I needed.
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.
But MS has a dillema: to use mouse gestures a user has to read the documentation and memorize what action does what, ( it's a power user tool), but I think reading the docs and memorizing cryptic mouse movements is a bit too much to ask from the average IE user!
I wish Opera (and any other browser implementing mouse gestures) would adopt a system similar to that used in some video games with complex manoeuvres: when the user holds down the right mouse button to perform a gesture, arrows should appear around the pointer to indicate which directions perform specific actions, similar to this page.
It should be enabled by default, but able to be removed once the user is familiar with the gestures.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
1. Pre-caching links on current page(s)
/.
There was once third party software that did this. No one cared much for it. If someone pre-fetched a bunch of pages on my website I'd kill them. Better yet, when they did a web search it'd pre-fetch everything on the page? Yuck. Not to mention it'd be pre-fetching goatse.cx links off of
2. Inline image zooming
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't use this often if at all. I'd be interested in knowing how it could be useful on a regular basis.
3. Right-click dictionary lookups
Doesn't Mozilla have this? If not, I know Mozilla Firebird does. It uses dictionary.com IIRC.
4. Automated (possibly encrypted) proxy chains
Erm.. paranoid? This seems like something you may want to setup outside of the browser if you're really into proxy chaining.
5. Less feature bloat
Mozilla Firebird rocks.
I believe it would be awkward as a "hovering" action, because of the time required to retreive even enough information to generate a preview.
This is especially the case for non-broadband users (which are still the majority of internet users).
While it might be possible to load in advance enough of the content to generate a preview for each link on a page, this also is not practical.
Many users, particularly non-broadband users, do not want bandwidth wasted to retrieve documents, the majority of which they will never visit.
Also, downloading all of this additional, and usually unwanted information would waste bandwidth that the user might want for, for example, documents loading in other tabs of your browser, and for downloads currently in progress.
Further, any plausible implementation would result in an inconsistent user experience. In some cases it can not be helped that if a user hovers the mouse above a link, the preview for that link will not yet have been downloaded. In other cases, it will work as planned.
Much better than a preview is rendering a loading page as it loads, step by step. This is the default behavior of Mozilla, but I believe not of IE.
The very best you might have from a preview would be to render only text, for example, until and unless the user requests that the document be rendered in full.
On modern processors, however, this would not save much time at all, and would probably be enough of a hassle and disruption to the normal browsing experience that it would not be used.
Ah yes, back in the good ol' days. They were indeed fun times.
I'm not sure what he thinks needs to happen. The standard interface will probably remain basically the same for years to come with only evolutionary changes.
There are several genuinely new interfaces out there but people are use to the current interface standard. There will always be a resistance to using (and learning) something new especially if it isn't sufficiently better than the status quo. Look at the Qwerty keyboard.
Still, that doesn't mean innovation can't or won't happen. I consider Google an excellent example of innovation; concepts like Wikis and blogs are also quite interesting.
Anything to help us sort, find, manage, create and share useful information will be welcome. That's what Google does. That's what wiki does.
Specific things I'd like to see:
Generalized Progress Monitor - consolidates all background tasks requiring things like progress bars into one single interface.
Link preview - hover over a link and get a preview of its contents. (Window with a shrunk image)
Open Annotation - An open and decentralized way for adding comments/critiques to web pages/sites you don't own, that is to say, your comments aren't being hosted by the site your commenting about; to cut down on clutter you should also be able to join certain communities to see only their comments, with a capable filtering/rating system. Maybe you only want to see comments made by people generally rated highly by a certain community of people. Various implementations of this sort of annotation already exist but none have yet reached critical mass it seems. I haven't checked into it in a long time so perhaps a lot of progress has happened on this front.
More meta-information for the sake of computers. XML will allow for this. We seem to be moving slowly along this front however; hopefully things will pick up. Search engines will get a lot smarter without requiring any advances in natural language processing.
iRider
If you take a look on that site, you'll see that the browser sport a rather interesting way to 'visualize' the navigator through a website. I've spent about 20 mins with it, and it is very handy, it feels more natural, the way it's organizes the history. It still have some roughs edges (I pushed the memory usage over the 200 MiBs, adjustable though) mainly relating to scripts, frames and other strange things that pollute the web.
Anyway, I think it's worth 10 mins test run.
I said it. Sorry. The harsh reality is the Internet is driven by the masses, and the masses want something that will wow them. More importantly keep their attention. Believe me, it is a short span. When I intalled the Flash plugin the other day for Mozilla I decided to check out the site of the day. It made me really think about the direction the web will ultimately go. Just look at this. It says clearly what we can expect the future of Internet innovation to be. The rest will become a great place for research, which is where the browser will stay. #!/i/am/chaos
One of the ways that browsers could have been open to more innovation is better UI widgetry. But, we have text boxes, buttons, pull-down menus and not much else because that's what you get with HTML.
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.
google
everything in moderation
Wow, this isn't well thought out at all.
Javascript, more properly DHTML, is amazingly better than it was at the height of the browser wars. Compare Danny Goodman's DHTML Definitive Guide 1st and 2nd editions. The first one is all about how to handle the differences between Netscape and MS. The 2nd is all about documenting the *standard* DOM and how to script it. MUCH easier than it was 5 years (or 3 years) ago.
Java applets are slow -- no argument there, but hello? Sun? Java is controlled nearly as tightly as Flash. And if you read Macromedia's marketing, they're basically presenting Flash as the Visual Basic of the web. Love or hate VB, it certainly made it easier to build applications. Something similar for the web would have a similar effect -- increased ability for developers to write great apps and increasingly crappy code from non-developers who think they're developers since easy GUI tools lower the barrier to entry for development projects.
Abuse of the technology -- cookie abuse, popups, etc -- is not the fault of the browser. tech is tech, use is use.
And I'm no fan of Microsoft, but Internet Explorer is a *great* browser. Again, wind the clock back 5, or even 3 years. And 6.x is now the last of it's kind before MS rolls it back into the OS.
I am currently serving time in the South, and that means Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Pabst Blue Ribbon are the majority swill here. If I am lucky, I can get some interesting brews in the local supermarket (usually when Enis messes up the monthly ordering at the Piggly Wiggly over on Rural Route 17).
Yeah, right.
Seriously, are you programmer? Why not try to implement these things yourself? You could be the 'next Marc' or whatever.
Even if you're not a programmer, start a project! If you don't, someone else will, and they'll be the millionaire.
/.: why the hell am I here?
I use a Mac at work, and man, I was so glad when Safari came out. Mozilla on the mac is a steaming pile of crap. IE is no better. Both are sluggish and tired. Unfortunately Mozilla Mail is the only e-mail client that has encryption for e-mail.
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).
Something like:
http://goatee.net/2002/03.html#_19tu
"Deployment Vertigo: the rapid advancement of the leading edge of technology (e.g., Moore's Law) when combined with conservative adoption (e.g., Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003) induces a sense of vertigo akin to Hitchcock's famous track-out/zoom-in shot....."
Well?
16 colors?! I remember back when we had 2 colors, green and black - and by golly we were happy to have those!
You wouldnt happen to be an inorganic professor, now would you?
In particular the fact that mozilla/firebird do not make page visits, referrers, times visited and the like easy to get at make this a bit tougher. I can read the file (history.dat) ok, but it just doesn't reliably have what I want (to be fair, it didn't have it the last time i worked on this which was a few months back).
I do save all the bookmarks and as much of the visited stuff in a database as I can in the hopes of finding what I want.
Eventually I'd like to build a directed graph of pages with various kinds of "related to by..." links that I can rearrange, rate sites in, and otherwise use to help make my browsing more productive.
Flash is a scourge, and so is Shockwave.
You have any idea why there aren't any cavemen around anymore?
There is nothing wrong with Flash, it's here to stay.. so deal with it.
Ahh inorganic chem, what fine memories it brings:
Yeah, right.
Speaking of cool xul, check out robin . I have no idea what to do with it (yet) but it is certainly cool.
...are listed here.
Examples:
Asynchronous Web Interfaces
Shared Zoomable Canvas
Seeing The Web Through The Eyes Of A Calendar
Nooface
In Search of the Post-PC Interface
I remember backmin 1970, we had all the color, and sounds sent to us, into our home, for free! Megabits per second streaming seamlessly into our homes. ;)
Granted, it was only one way
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Marc Andreessen is a fraud.
Speak truth to power.
Get over it Marc, they sucked.
I spent years living in the Southland. Look harder, there are great brewpubs all over the South.
FreeSpeech.org
This *is* a good point... Imagine the /.ing that sites would get if you didn't even have to go to any of the pages for it to try to load...
Personal Home Page/Form Interpreter, plus a 20 page manual (compilation and installation instructions but mostly internal functions documentantion) and only one mailing list (and one of the most helpful and kind technical mailing lists I ever subscribed).
But then again that was even before the time Mark talks about. An Internet eon...
browsing for porn. Would you like to:
a) View quality free XXX sites
b) Optimize your mouse/keyboard for better one-handed surfing
c) Find out how to clear your cache before mom comes home
You sound very much like one of my professors. Teaches at the college of Charleston.
It seems to me that Netscape was way ahead of MS in the beginning and they were sitting on a boat load of money from a huge IPO. Why do you suppose all of those innovations that he had in his head never made it into his product. He certainly had the resources.
Let's face it, Microsoft doesn't play fair but Netscape didn't innovate fast enough and by IE 3.0-4.0 MS had closed the gap. Netscape didn't have any great features that IE hadn't duplicated already. Microsoft is a master of this game. They just keep chasing you and wearing you down. They just copied what Netscape did and kept refining it. Making it work better in Windows. They win.
Netscape made the same mistake that IBM, Novell, WordPerfect, Lotus, Palm, and many others made. They innovated too slowly, basically sat on their laurels and MS was able to catch up and overtake them.
If Andreessen had these great innovative ideas, he should have patented them to protect them for a while and put them in his product as quickly as possible. MS would not have been able to copy them without infringing on the patent. It would have at least slowed them down a little. Netscape didn't do anything innovative though. Hyperlinking, HTML, forward and back buttons were all wide open and MS could copy at will.
I can't blame Marc Andreessen for taking full advantage of being in the right place at the right time but I think that he blew his load on Mosaic. What we are hearing is bitterness at MS. I can't blame him but he isn't one of the people that I look to for insight into the future. I just don't think that he is much brighter than the rest of us. Not a dummy to be sure but not a visionary either.
Lastly, I'm not sure that the browser needs a whole lot of innovation. Part of the beauty of it is its simplicity. Forward, back, and hyperlink are easy concepts for people to understand and master. I don't know that we can change it that quickly without screwing up less sophisticated users.
The innovation is on the back end. ASP,JSP, PHP to build the pages from dynamic data. XML to represent the data in a portable, cross platform way. Web services for cross platform RPC. These are the real innovations that have happened. The money was never in the browser Marc, it was in getting content to the web.
Exactly. I would much rather see browsers considered mature technology while getting their standards correct then more tacked on 'enhancements.'
I don't want a browser that's secretly a P2P app.
I don't want embedded media and plug-ins crashing it.
I don't want a browser that is also a PIM.
I don't want a little avatar asking me if I want to go to shamelessmarketers.com.
etc.
Why does everything have to be attached to the browser? A simple interface and a stable platform is what companies should be aiming for, with the exception of tweaks and minor enhancements like pop-up blocking, tabs, etc.
The Mozilla team has learned from this mistake. People kept complaining about the "Mozilla Suite" and the bloat and they responded by announcing plans to seperate the browser from the suite.
Microsoft in the meantime continues its "the browser is the desktop" nonsense which mixes WAN data with the OS. As we've seen with ActiveX, vbs, etc this is a security nightmare.
I'm not sure what Andreesen was secretly planning, but an url box, back/forward buttons, and a stop button are surprisingly effecient when dealing with html-based technologies.
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!
There are a few differences between window manager level tabbed browsing and application level tabbed browsing. First of all, OS-level tabs (separate windows) take up more memory and more of Win9x's 64 KB System Resources heap than app-level tabs. Second, with app-level tabs, I can keep separate sets of pages open in separate windows: Slashdot stories (with their related articles) in one set, Kuro5hin in another set, E2 in another, gbadev.org in another, ddrei.com in another, etc., and I can minimize one whole web site at a time. I have ADD like that.
What I see as the few great new features since the web started are:
10. RSS feeds.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I tried to follow your link. All I got was a message asking me to wait for the page to load and giving me the option to 'click here' for text based navigation.
After waiting about a minute on DSL, I opted for text navigation. The home page did not even indicate what the company did.
The back button took me to the 'wait' page, but repeated clicking of 'back' would not get me off that page. I have a policy of never going back to any site that tries to keep me from leaving.
Morris
The truth is, that Netscape stopped all innovation at 4.5. The rest of the world moved on, and they STILL don't see that [...] CSS [is] great web innovatio[n] that continue[s] to push the envelope.
And Netscape 7.1 has a beautiful implementation of CSS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
He's right, IMHO it happened once the W3C took over. Committees are great at slowing down progress.
There are many natural innovations which are screaming to be done. Here's a list:
1) A simpler way to navigate a set of pages as intended by the author,
2) better history management,
3) better programming support (javascript sucks, java doesn't even know what the browser is)
4) XML style links (which in particular allow for inline inclusions)
and on and on...
iRider has some interesting features, such as thumbnail navigation, downloading pages in the background by right-clicking a link, open multiple links by highlighting them and clicking one, keeping pages in memory for fast page recall, etc.
Make sure to checkout the demo movie.
Interoperability: JavaScript is dead (unless you're masochist enough trying to be complatible with IE and Netscape)
IE 5.x supports enough of the W3C DOM to make portable scripting possible. IE 6 supports even more, making portable scripting plausible. Netscape 7.x supports pretty much everything in W3C DOM. (Very few people use 4.x browsers anymore.)
Have you had specific bad experiences with trying to get the same script to run properly in IE 5.5 or later and Netscape 6.2 or later?
ads are anoing (only mozilla seems to care enough to allow you to block them).
Don't Konqueror and Safari have "block images from this server" as well?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm giving up my mod points so I hope the other moderators will mod up the parent.
I cannot agree enough with your post. I just finished an application written entirely in DOM, CSS, and Javascript. The HTML frames are generated entirely out of Javascript code. No "regular" HTML is sent to the client.
I kept to bare W3C DOM objects and methods, such as addChild, document.createElement, and so forth. Guess what?
It works in IE 6+, Mozilla (+derivatives), Safari, and others. No browser detection. No special coding. No hacks.
Also, note that this is a full blown web-based application so I feel justified in asking my users to upgrade their browsers. I wouldn't do this on a home page or regular site that people visit. Eventually we can expect 6+ browsers for home pages, but not yet.
Also also, despite my thinking the app is pretty cool in its dynamic interfaces, I can't say enough how much of a screwed up language Javascript is. The companies have really screwed us this time. It's a pain to debug. It's a pain to write (being combined with another server-side language, python in my case).
It's too bad that I think DHTML is the future. I really do think it will make it because it achieves dynamic content without plugins. I just wish it was cleaner. Perhaps IE will finally suppor W3C standards and the language/DOM support will clean up as time goes on. I'm hoping but not holding my breath...
- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser.
How many of them were duplicates of them?tiktir.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I was blinded by the science behind beatnik
with the GF!
imagine when she fires up IE and all the bookmarks are full of pr0n... well at least i could say "The browser added those bookmarks by itself!"
...and probably taken out of context. These quotes were made about a week ago. The comments also seemed to be in response to Microsoft's recent actions (no more Mac IE, no more stand alone IE).
Marc's probably pretty annoyed that his comments are getting misconstrued this way.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
The next innovation in browsers comes when John Carmack gets bored writing FPS games and starts integrating 3D display technology with web surfing.
I had such high hopes back when VRML was hyped, but it passed on. Why isn't the web going 3D?
Well I think that perhaps a great innovation in the web and web browsing in general is the use of the web browser as a platform for remote applications.. i.e. email over the web, blogs, ebay, blah blah, etc. The web browser has reached the highest level of 'fitness' (though small improvements are being made constantly) that it needs to basically disappear and let innovation happen in server-side applications. Think of it like DNA. The process that DNA goes through to produce proteins has no need to change...all of the "innovation" is happening at a higher level.
But, I think there is also reams of innovation happening on the web, and based on HTTP and XML (the simple building blocks that someone else said stifled innovation because they weren't improving).
Big E.G.: The Apple Music Store. All of the guts are web based, and iTunes just renders stuff (using Apple's WebKit renderer (Safari) i believe) based on XML it receives from Apple's servers. I have no idea how they handle the downloading, but there's no reason why they don't just use HTTP(S) as well.
Think of RSS (and consequently news aggregators), XML-RPC/SOAP (REST, MIME-RPC). Not all of these show up in the web browser, but things like RSS have great potential for it (and if it weren't for firewalls, i think peer-to-peer web stuff would also be blossoming). I think that "semantic" improvements to the web based on RDF are going to start happening a lot, and web browsers will improve because of it. Well, maybe just Google. But like I said, web apps like Google are the innovation.
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
Tabbed browsing is old hat! IBrowse for the Amiga had it over two years ago! Yeah, I like it but is not new. ac
- well, word processing hasn't changed all that much either in the last five years.
Good point. Speaking of Word Processing, I had two consultants in my office today (one of whom readsI bet they've already downloaded and began using it!
One reason Word Processing hasn't changed much in 5 years is that the paradigm is well defined and most every (conceivable) need is met. I'd even venture to say that the reason there have been releases of Word since Office 97, or, to be kind, Office 2000 has been purely revenue enhancement via license churning; no user of Word 97 is missing a critical feature in later versions of Word. Except activation, of course!. But, I digress.
The other reason for lack of changes in Word Processing in the last 5 years is that 5 years ago (or so) Microsoft officially killed off any real competition in the Word Processing market. No need to innovate.
OOo has mainly been a MS Office replacement excercise to this point -- but with the new beta some new ground is being broken and I have hope for real competition, not just functional replacement, to Office now. Every one I show OOo1.2b to is super-impressed with the PDF and SWF capabilities. Sure, alternatives to Adobe and Macromedia existed for a long time in the Open Source world -- but not so brain-dead simply. In fact, OOo makes PDF creation easier than Word/Acrobat5 (which I bought 2 months before OOo1.2b was released).
Even on the browser -- IE even -- there is innovation. Everyone is touting Mozilla/Firebird/Opera/Safari/Konqueror (and should be talking about NetFront) but the real innovation happening is with Google. Google is the reason I still use MSIE 6 on Windows -- painless, free pop-up blocking makes MSIE 6 bearable. And, for the first time I've started a blog (not that anyone cares, I understand) due to the "blog this" button Google's latest toolbar sports. The browser is a platform for further development. Google is leading the way.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Very good; i18n. tyop on my part.
http://www.i18ngurus.com/index.html
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
In other news, W3C standards support has been greatly improving for the past five years, ever since the horrid crapfest that was Netscape 4.5.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
damn, id bust a nut all over her rack...
Compaq portable, baby.
That covers most of the uses of JavaScript that aren't related to advertising.
The innovation on the Web has moved to the server side. Even large sites five years ago were very dependent on static pages. ASP, PHP, mod_perl, and Servlets were not used nearly as much as they are today. The dynamicism of sites has dramatically increased. The browsers always supported this, it's just that the server software wasn't there. I think part of it must have had to do with the processing cost of dynamically generating all pages, but I am no expert.
.net or as single-platform as activex). Also large concepts like the page based model--which worked great for gopher and the early web, but which seems to be losing its luster lately.
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
That dosn't make any sense at all, adware/spyware run totaly seperate of the browser. Sure, they can be installed by ActiveX, but only if you're stupid enough to click 'yes' on those random installs.
Adware is usualy bundled with shareware anyway
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
sore winner!
-pyrrho
You'd have this little tree-graph of all the site's you been to. If you whent back and clicked a link, you'd go down one in the tree (this would be a little grapic near the forward-back buttons). Going back and forth would be as fast as switching windows (ie, cashed in memory. If I want to reload, I'll reload, damnit). These days, if I want to visit more then one linked page, I have to open a new window. With this sort of a setup would make things much easier.
Anyway, now that i've said it, I guess I've got a year or so to patent. Anyone want to loan me $750?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Let's face it: There's not much we need to work on, since Moz and Opera nicely handle pop-ups. But I do think my pr0n browsing experience could be better.
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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
It may not be the best solution, but what about something like this: a 'teach gestures' option; when checked, every time the user did something another way that could be more efficiently done with a gesture, this would display a popup with a diagram of the relevant technique.
It was called 'clipy' and people hated it. (I actualy found some usefull info from that little bastard, that I could 'auto solve' for certan cells in a spreadsheet)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Very good; i18n. tyop on my part.
:)
I think I would've just assumed that, if google hadn't returned a bunch of hits for i8n...
Must be a common tyop
No, not a sensible choice like Red, green, blue and black. oh no. We had black, white, magenta and cyan!
Well you did, anyway. My first PC had true color. Heh.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Mozilla's use of a single file for all bookmarks is probably one of the reasons why Mozilla has such a hard time dealing with running multiple instances of Mozilla for the same user.
One-file-per-bookmark is a simple and nice solution to that problem. It also makes merging bookmarks easier. Mozilla should really adopt it.
I wouldn't call any of those good uses of Flash. Something like this, on the other hand...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
try visiting autopr0n with NS4. You get no design whatsoever, just text. If you want the web to look nice, use a browser that doesn't suck (or in other words, any browser other then NS4. A browser without CSS will simply display a normal site, while the CSS enabled browser will render the page nicely. NS4 will just fuck everything up)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
In fact, he is maybe using it and maybe that's why innovation stopped for him at Netscape 4.5.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
I don't know how many times I've backed up on a path, gone down some other path, then wanted to get back to where I was. I could back up to the fork point, but didn't have any "Forward" options other than where I just came from.
Just use the "History" window. Select the menu item "View: Explorer Bar: History", and you'll see all the pages that you have visted.
ONLY XUL!
I think people ignore the fact that innovation had to die (in a sense) for the web to gain broader acceptance. I mean, the basics haven't really changed since the days of Mosaic - Home, Back, Forward, Bookmarks. It's clean, simple, and makes sense to your Grandmother.
The back-end stuff like CSS, PHP, etc. is all transparent to your average end-user, and innovation hasn't really died there I don't think.
When you start reinventing the wheel because you can, or innovating for innovation's sake, or adding in lots of "neat" features you just end up with a confused and bloated product.
Think of Word, where something like 95% of the people use 5% of the features. I just made up those statistics of course, but you know what I mean.
If them Mozilla folks would hurry up!
and makes you lucky!
-pyrrho
- 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.... people would listen.
so much, so very much can hide behind a conditional, can't it!
-pyrrho
I had a choice of 2 color schemes:
green and black or
white and black.
absolutely!
-pyrrho
Gee...sometimes I wish blink tags worked on subject lines....
Browser are becoming a mature product in their product life cycle. Why does this need to be bad in the first place?
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.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
I'm surprised anyone modded your moronic post up
then again, this is slashdot
Sometimes I scroll through a huge page... or a site with frames, or a situation that otherwise makes it incredibly difficult to bookmark the information I need.
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.
4 Colors! Ha! You spoiled little brat! In my days we had ... we had ... NO colors at all, yeah that's right ... errr. Nah, I was a CGA guy myself as well. There were also some monochrome displays, at least they had underlining capabilities. :-)
(Age 25)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
They did that. It's called CSS.
If only it were so. But you can't validate a form using CSS alone. The INPUT element ought to have at least as much validation as the old IBM green-screen terminals. You should be able to specify things like "exactly 5 digits, must fill". Among other things, this would produce a consistent, snappy validation interface for forms. But no, that takes programming for every form field in the world.
Is that there seems to be no basic way to make seperate tables act like seperate images (like seperate words) in that they can reflow to horizontally use the window.
It totally kills window size adaptability for some things.
Tables would rock if they could do that. Who decided against it anyways?
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
But how do you index flash content? How do you google for something cool you saw in a flash-based site? How do you bookmark one page within a flash interface? Can I skip that #$%^#% intro animation?
Until flash has better answers for those questions than "It can't be done" "but why would you want to?" and "the content creators want you to see that animation", I'll take html, thanks.
0 1 - just my two bits
I'd like to see browsers go down a similar path to XWT - become a cross-platform presentation layer with lots more GUI elements. In 2003, we should be using tools with a similar number of drag-and-drop controls as VB's GUI designer to draw our Web pages.
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.
I can think of a few innovations I've wanted in a web browser for a long time, none of which involving integrating chat programs, download managers, or embedding premium services within the browser.
If innovation is indeed dead, it's because there's no money in continuing to enhance browser design beyond performance improvements and ancillary features, unless you actually earn revenue from it (Opera) or browser development can be done at near zero dollar cost (Mozilla).
I agree with jdray's sentiments about the Forward button. I'd personally like to the browser to be more forward-looking. I'd like bad links on webpages to dimmed or otherwise invalidated before hand so I'll know not to even bother to click on them.
640 KB is almost enough for anyone
The lunatic is in my head
Those are *UI* improvements, not *browser* *innovations*.
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.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
The description of which goes XML+visual basic crap gives my htm an head ache!
IE OFFICE ETC ETC all hackable with stupid web content.
There has been much software innovation going on at Microsoft. The problem is they are perverting htm so that it is becoming a hyped up popup information junk pile. Being able to web spam at will through xml-visual studio contrived consumer traps has become the goal of web commerce, not customer service. Servers must alow this to happen in order to survive.
End result; the real innovation on the web is being controlled by air heads and corporate monolyths.
Don't worry the boys and girls at some innovative MS based junk web-ware firm will soon get around popup blocking.
About your signature.
(x=Root pi/2, where y=z*x and z is a whole number) is a more interesting concept. Try to express that in C. Three dimensional math is key to the next step in processor technology, using the dreaded nanotube.
Those that think in three dimensions are not constrained by their senses, of sound, light or oft-times so called common sense.
I dream of the math for holographic data processors and the language(s) that will be required. C math won't cut it.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
lab used a casher-type roller instead of a monitor.
A green monitor was science fiction many years
ago.
I no longer feel young when ohters complain
about 256 colors.
Tell him to look at this. Two grand innovations: pinning (mark a page "open" (even on exit) until I explicitly say to kill it) and outline-style tabbed browsing, (naturally organizes browsing behavior into little "books"). I just wish it were open source and ran on linux . . .
Someone above stated that they don't like how they can be navigating, go back, take another path, then not be able to go forward on the first path they took. Why not have a roll-down/menu that shows a family-tree-style layout of the sites recently visited, listed by page title? Perhaps with time of visit, or color-coded to indicate time of visit? That would really help those of us who don't browse in a very linear fashion.
At least someone got the story straight on why and when Navigator became free.
http://www.kaylon.com
It uses keyword search capability as well as taking note of how many times you access a bookmark so it can list them in that order if you want.
It supports Opera 7 and Mozilla (but not Firebird yet) as well as Netscape and IE (it even sits in the top bar of IE like a google search on Opera).
I'd like to see a free version of this program written because it's fairly indispensable when it comes to having 3000 bookmarks!
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
For Internet Explorer and Netscape. So What. Who cares.
There's a lot of innovation going on in the PDA/Smartphone browser arena that he seems blissfully unaware of.
How dare he use the word 'innovation' outwith the context of Microsoft!
I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin sumthing like that.
If the things they "had in mind" were anything like their context-destroying Frame model, or their DTD-breaking Object substitute Embed: Good riddance.
Why didn't they implement proper support for Link relationships? Why did they feel the need to make their own Java security model? Why did they hack their own Javascript-based styling instead of just implementing CSS properly?
The software industry is better off without them. A worse case of "Not Invented Here" mentality is hard to find.
Include the following on your web page and help put a stop to the Internet Exploder madness!
<html>
<form>
<input type cool>
</form>
We're still busy sorting out the mess and getting browsers to be as standards compliant as possible.
This is a good thing.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
What I really want is a button that takes me to the "next" page of a multi-page document, and one that takes me to the "previous" page. Up should then be changed to go to the next higher level in the document structure. With this the info browser - may infernal demons eat its heart out - can finally be replaced with the web browser.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Sorry.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I said the same thing about web browsers three months ago...
You should always be coding according to the following principles:
- Never trust the user.
- Never trust client software to do anything on its own.
- Never trust data that wasn't generated by the current process.
- Never trust data that's been out of your program's hands for any length of time.
- Always assume the user will try to feed the program the entire contents of
/dev/urandom as input, and kill hunt you down and kill you if it doesn't tell them off.
In short:You might want to try Mozilla's mouse gestures (or what the mozdev crowd call radial-context menus). It's not identical in design to that in your link, but it does the job well if you like that kind of thing...
This is a great succinct description of what is wrong with flash. Could not have put it better myself.
The thing Marc Andreessen does not say is that all the innovation is not around HTML anymore. It's RSS, Echo (well, soon :), two way communications in Blogs (Trackback, Pingback, Referrer lists, etc), FOAF, GeoURL, etc.
For the moment, all these higher level ideas are being integrated into web pages, because the browsers aren't using them (except for RSS readers).
Today's browsers are the user interface to HTML. We still have to invent the user interface for these technologies. They are the next layer of the web.
I know it's not really the browser .... but, I'd like to see a development in URL so they follow the page when it moves.
Content addressing might be a further option - the link brings up a list of places that the same content is stored at and you choose where to drag your content from, this could also show origin if dates where added into the mix.
There is hope for replacement of Javascript, at least for the mozilla platform - via the XUL framework. Here is an discussion about
plXPCOM Perl interface.
My ZX81 didn't have any colours at all, only black and white. It went black and blue when the TV set broke though. And at my last job, the computer didn't even have a CRT on the console. It had a teletype, and the ink had run out and they stopped making ribbons years ago. We had surgeons gloves and a bottle of Quink.
Stick Men
How the **** is this a troll? He's right, Opera 7 is pretty innovative. The default skin is ugly, but apart from that it's a very neat browser. And most (but not all) of the features Mozilla users claim as innovation in their browser were in Opera years before.
...that french director of patent office in around 1850, who closed his office saying: "We have now learned everything and there is nothing left to discover. Therefore the function of my office is useless." Guess he never heard of a car or a computer :o)
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.
/.ed?
Less is more !
... and if 5 buttons is not enough - give me 10 button mouse. Wait, I have 101 buttons on my keyboard - can I use it as a mouse? Wow, in xterm I have the most freedom Iever had! Seems like I don't need any mouse any more!
Less is more !
So, either way, users wishing to have tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, and improved security will find it in the cross-platform browsers Mozilla and Opera.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
... and runs at blazing speeds
Cheers,
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
True, there has not been much innovation since the NS 4.x days. However, this does not mean that there is no potential for innovation. I do believe that sooner or later, developers will realize that people want to be able to manage information instead of browse the web, read email, or enter appointments. Sooner or later, a program will appear that integrates web ressources, emails, PIM, local documents and other stuff in a way that enables people to manage those pieces of information that are needed to do their jobs. Let me give you an example: when you get an email from your boss telling you to do task X until some date, currently: you enter something in the calendar, marking it with some topic, you mark the email or put it in a folder related to the topic, you might need to use the web for research and put URLs in a bookmark folder related to the topic. You edit and manipulate local documents and data, stored in some directory related to the topic. But there is nothing except your brain that makes the connection between these different pieces of information that really should belong together. Instead of supporting work the way you need it, the programs support it the way it is easy to program. IMO, a browser suite like Mozilla could be a good starting point to integrate the web, email, PIM, document metainformation and other things in an innovative way, without becoming a monster like MS-Office/IE/Outlook that - although integrated on a technical level - does not integrate information and functionality (on a conceputal level).
In Safari, Command-Clicking on the page title brings up a menu of each directory below your current location on the site. It's home, up, and everything in between, all in one click.
I came up with a major web innovation last week. Bite my sac, Marc. I'll work up a demo in a week or so...
Sammitch Boi
BeDoper
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.
Why are they talking to this overblown loser anyway? What innovation is he responsible for lately? Who's venture money is he burning threw now? Gosh, I thought he collapsed on the rotting pile of other dot bomb has-beens years ago.
What I'd like to know, is wtf happened to this 3D web thing that was supposed to be oh-so-easy with the a bit of VRML and a CosmoPlayer and so forth?
Any news on *that* one, dudes -- or should I re-post on "Ask Slashdot":
Dear Slashdot,
I have just seen Johnny Mnemonic, finished
reading Neuromancer for the 83rd time, and am
now ploughing through Tad Williams' Otherland
stuff. I hear that the Web has just had its
tenth birthday, but it remains resolutely flat.
When the fuck is the 3D version gonna come
along?
Instead, we try to 'update' TV so that it can basically do what a browser already does better. Why not the other way around? I don't wanna browser my TV, I wanna 'watch' the web!!
Just my 0.02
Nalfy
P.S. And no, I don't mean crap like Browse3D
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
You could say that web-browsing is a solved problem, and browers don't need any new features.
He was referring to server-side applications to make the page dynamic? Could be wrong, but I hope to God he's not implying that we should let programs be run from web pages client side. He honestly can't be, then the crashes wouldn't just crash IE, they'd crash the computer, and he might as well change his background to the BSOD with how much he'd be seeing it on '98.
What sort of expansion did you get on one of them, anyway?
Perhaps someday in a similar fashion, html authors will quit trying to impress their clients with their 1337 5k1||z and just create informative, navigable websites.
I can dream.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I'd say tabbed browsing is by far one of the greatest innovations to browsers in quite a long time. I'd give up my history, forward command, homepage, and view source commands just for tabbed browsing
This guy has founded what 2 to 3 businesses? How many of them are financially viable on their own today?
..Opsware. Opsware was originally one app that Loudcloud offered. Now its an entire (but much smaller) company on its own. Can Andreessen do ANYTHING right?
Lets start with Netscape. If AOL hadn't have bought it then it would have closed up shop by now.
Next is Loudcloud. This was supposed to be his next big thing. It wasn't. It had to be redone and "repurposed" into.......
And don't get me started on Jim Clarke......
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
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?
Mark Anderson (sp?) apparently slept through 2001, when CubicEye burst onto the scene. CubicEye is more innovative than the Internet itself.
Almost all of the information on Javascript you can find on the web is aimed at web designers who aren't programmers. They pass around little snippets of code that "worked for me", which 99% of the time really means "worked when I tried it on IE". I personally would kill for a document entitled "Javascript for people who know what a first-class function is", because such a document might be written by someone who knows Javascript from MS DOM from ECMA DOM, and might explain it to me.
While I'm waiting for that document, my favorite Javascript reference is http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/version5.html.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
It's amazing how many of these posts are missing the point. Things like tabbed browsing and popup suppression are like different frames for the same picture. It's true that the picture hasn't changed in at least five years.
Here's an example of an innovation that was included in the very first web browser and planned to be part of the web all along: annotations. You should be able to view all the annotations that people have made on a web page, make your own comments, or follow links they've added to other sites. And of course, you can, if you know about Annotea and have installed the Mozilla annotation plugin... but why isn't this feature part of all browsers' base feature set? It's been around forever. (And don't say "people don't want it"--people don't even know it's possible, and if you had it and didn't want to use it you could just ignore it.) Annotations represent a quantum leap in web browsing, and it's this sort of innovation that Andreesen is talking about.
I guess what he meant was stuff like 3D surfing, and all that. But the point is, things eventually have what is needed. There is no point in having more than whats needed just because its new, and interesting. who cares for features that nobody will use?
In that respect, I believe the browsers are pretty well
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
I find the gestures to be handy because the nature of using a GUI means I generally need a hand on my mouse much of the time. If I'm already using my mouse to switch between windows, launch programs, etc., then it's easier to gesture to reload the window than it is to move my hand from my mouse to my keyboard to do the same thing. (That's a bit more travel than it may seem at first; I like to keep my keyboard in my lap, though my mouse sits on my desk.)
/. about very neat interface devices that blur the line between keyboard and mouse. My personal favourite is the gesture pad with a keyboard overprinted, that allowed two-handed gesturing and typing. (Now, to win the lottery...)
Of course, there are two counterarguments to that logic. One is that I could/should learn more of the keyboard shortcuts that are available to me. Much of what I do may well be possible using only the keyboard. When it becomes as convenient to discover the shortcut for a given action as it is to do the same action using the mouse (via button, menu or gesture) then I'll probably switch.
The other is that my interface to the computer could use improvement. There's been all sorts of stories here on
Of course, the coolest toys aren't directly supported in Linux, but that's a different rant.
SIG: 11
What important thing happened after browser forms, encrypted connections and (partly) javascript, which allowed e-commerce to happen. After that: XML, web services, media streaming etc, but nothing really groundbreaking. Actually, it went worse, with all popup ads, email viruses and spam...
You were lucky to have black (and white). I remember back when the vibrator burned out in the old battery set and we had to drive the car up close to the house and open the door so we could hear the radio. (Never ran the battery down on that old 42 buick!)
For some details, check out some of the papers 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.
I just wish IE would get 1/3 of a clue about Ctrl-F; I *always* want to see that box prepopulated with my last search (IE seems to have non-deterministic rules for that, and is less likely to show you the last result if the search was unsuccessful...which is when you'd want it most) and I NEVER want to see that retarded "what kind of search do you want to do?" sidebar that shows up if the page hasn't loaded.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I'm orginally from the pacific northwest [seattle], and I recently moved to Arizona from Anchorage...and the biggest shock [aside from the heat] is the ABSOLUTE LACK of ANY kind of micro-brew here. I don't know how things are in Phoenix, but here in the outlying area, it's michelob, budweiser or other assorted shit [and I do mean shit]
:-D
Makes me glad I went sober aproximately a year before I came down here...otherewise I'd be absolutely devestated.
OTOH, I haven't seen anywher in Ak or Wa where you could buy a case [and then some--30 beers per unix] for $11.
I really hope this becomes the new troll.
A web browser is the perfect example of this. Bookmarks ('favorites'), foward, back, stop, and 'go' are all you need
It's all you need. Why do you feel this pressing desire to tell me what I need?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Or at least, last time I took a look it was. But then people are annoyed at having to use a password to install software, so they constantly run as Administrator...
It's because that was the height of web browsing. We're all actually browsing inside a spyware app and it recreated the internet of 5 years ago inside it to keep us all pacified so we wouldn't realize it.
Perhaps you need to upgrade or re-configure your copy of lynx ;-) Try hitting the backspace key: instant history list.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Now Marc Andreesen can join the ranks of revolutionaries-turned-old-cranks, like Eric Raymond, Bill Joy, and RMS.
The beauty of HTML and the web is that is separated data from presentation. Then the design community got involved and it's been all down hill. They want to build the web as if it were a printed document controlling everything. Result? A remarkable number of sites that only handle IE and absolutely ugly html "code." Free Clue: HTML ain't code, people.. I guess that's just a remnant from the care free 1990's when life was good and you hired a bunch of psycology majors and such to do "coding" because there weren't enough software engineers to do the work.
I'm not even sure where to start with shock and flash... It would be nice if there were some standards. I hold Netscape largely responsible for "plugins" that have allowed this type of bastardization of the web. I don't know if I'd go so far as too call that shit innovation. The way I see it we had a beautiful and simple way to make data accessable, then we started taking steps backward and instead if making it easily accessable flash/shock/others made it harder to access, less accessable and accessable to a smaller group of people. Throw the security considerations in and it's reall unacceptable to expect somebody to download a plugin to access your data. In today's world I only accept shrink-wrapped binaries (since I'm a linux user they also happen to be PGP/GPG signed by Redhat or Mandrake) or source code. I'm sure as hell not downloading a fucking "plugin" to watch your icons bounce on your webpage. Thanks netscape!
I agree to some degree innovation slowed down, because we've taken steps backwards. I'm not saying the web needs to be plain and ugly, and with HTML4+ and XHTML and SVG and the different standards there are lot's of ways to make it more attractive looking. We've taken huge steps backwards because we've placed look above function and made the web a one vendor place where IE is king. It's just now getting back to when mozilla and opera and mac and linux users have a legitimate browser to view with.
Java applets are NOT slow. Poorly written java applets certainly are. There are poorly written, slow programs in many languages, not just java. In fact, Ive written both.
;).
My first java applet at my current job is a horrid beast. Its a simple scrolling applet that polls a url to get updates. The scrolling part is absolutely horrible looking, but its my fault. Using sleep and moving a set ammount after each sleep will end up with jerky animation on anything except a real time OS.
My second java applet on the otherhand, is wonderful. It loads and parses huge data files, and builds up a visual representation of the data. See http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/ for the code I started from (side note, there is a horrible sort routine you will need to replace to get any kind of performance). It builds up huge tree structures in memory and lets you view any node in the tree by zooming in/out. Also included are advanced filtering capabilities, etc. Unfortunately, my company does not have a demo anywhere publicly accessable, but the applet is as fast as any visualization tool Ive used, faster than the competiton, but with more features and a more generic tool in general (see http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/ for the competition). And yes, im quite proud of my work
As far as IE, my biggest problem with it is that it allows "web designers" far too much leeway in what it accepts as html and javascript. Then I get stuck trying to fix this wonderful code to make it work on mozilla.. sigh
dave
There was a website out there where the owner was a jerk and on every page of his, he put a couple 1 x 1 pixel IFRAMES that loaded a page from his competitor's website. His page loaded fine (since the layout engines knew the size, they didn't wait for the whole IFRAME to load) and each page caused a bandwidth sap on his competitors site, costing him money and being a small scale DDoS.
I can't understand why nobody's bothered to create this one either -- it's kind of straightforward:
That's all there is to it. This could be packaged as web service with free and subscribtion based plans (added bells and whistles: unlimitted file size, work/home versions of bookmark files, recommended links related to your interests, etc.)
Not sure, why none of those web sites that offer bookmark services have done that.
Navigational AI is a bit harder -- a lot of common links are done as images. You'd need OCR, symbol recognition (shopping cart icon) to provide full service. But even rudimentary assistance for text links wouldn't hurt:
A bit more unvolved, but not rocket science really.
Opera was not the first browser with gestures. HyperTIES supported gestures in the form of pie menus with full mouse-ahead display pre-emption, which I developed at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction lab during 1988-1991, under the direction of Ben Shneiderman. All this and more was demonstrated in the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review "All The Widgets", a video tape of user interface techniques produced by Brad Myers for the ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review (CHI'90 Special Issue #57). Here's a streaming quicktime excerpt from the All the Widgets.
Mozilla was not the first browser with a pie menu plug-in. In 1997 I developed a pie menu ActiveX plug-in for Internet Explorer in C++ (which is not just limited to the browser, but plugs into any application supporting OLE/ActiveX). Here's a streaming quicktime demo of ActiveX pie menus. Here's the ActiveX Pie Menus web page, with the binary ActiveX control, the free open source code, and a description of pie menus.
Several years later (about a year before Mozilla's Optimoz), I developed another pie menu plug-in for Internet Explorer, implemented in JavaScript, using Dynamic HTML for rendering, and XML for defining the nested tree of pie menus. You can embed arbitrary HTML in the XML pie menu description to control the appearance, and you can write JavaScript handlers not only to handle the menu selections, but also to provide rich dynamic feedback (by modifying the dynamic html and style properties in the fly, in response to mouse motion and clicks).
Here is the JavaScript Pie Menus web page, with links to examples, documentation, etc.
That dilemma dones't apply to pie menus. Pie menus are a visible "self revealing" style of gesture recognition, that prompt the user with directions, as opposed to invisibe "self concealing" gesture recognition that has no way to prompt the user.
Pie menus are easy for novice users, because they pop up and show all of the possible directions in an intuitive way. They're also efficient for expert users, because you can "mouse ahead" without looking at the screen. Novice users quickly and easily learn to be experts, because the expert mouse-ahead gesture is the same motion and direction as the novice gesture, unlike pull-down menus with function key shortcuts. Learning to select the third "Paste" item on the pull-down "Edit" menu with the mouse does not train you to press Ctrl-V, which is a totally different gesture, so pull-down menus don't support rehearsal.
The other reason that pie menus are fundamentally better that conventional gesture recognition systems, is that they totally cover 100% of all possible gesture space with meaningful, predictable behavior. Gesture space is the space of all possible gestures, between the beginning of the gesture (pressing down the mouse button, touching the pen to the screen, whatever), to the end of the gesture (releasing the button). The computer has to analyze that gesture and decide what to do, and it's a good thing if does what the human intended more often than not.
When using a handwr
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Oh snap:
one
two
three
I certainly hope not, XML is an over-hyped protocol that just flat out sucks. Among other reasons, it's unnecessarily verbose and does not handle binary data well. It can be proven that parsing XML is at least three times as slow as other formats such as Joe Armstrong's UBF.
I recently moved my 8 year old to Mozilla. Ater seeing the improvment, my six year declared at dinner "Daddy, upgrade my browser to Mozilla." Really -- that's a verbatim quote. Both kids *love* Mozilla.
Never underestimate the marketing power of a fire-breathing dinosaur.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Because what people need is fairly objective. If you have personal, subjective desires (wants) that's just fine, but just because those wants are not incorporated into everyone's browser doesn't mean "innovation is dead."
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
That's funny, in 1998 I didn't see any decent browser provide an XML configurable UI, tabs, sidebars, source code or anything like that...
He might mean that yes, users are sick of a bunch of features loaded with the browser that hog resources and crash all the time and they hardly if ever use. Netscape's biggest mistake was the monolithic Communicator, and I'm glad to see Mozilla finally getting it right with Firebird.
r4lv3k
netscape is a mere copy of Mozilla, since they didnt win against IE, thats the only thing they can say to find a relieve.
The translation to that is: "We sucked, therefore we lost, therefore we have nothing more to do in that area, we are lost, we are a sorry piece of crap".
The necessary components are all in place: XML, web services, dynamic html, scripting languages, rich libraries of open source software components ready for the picking, plug-in component architectures, cheap consumer devices with lots of memory, processing power and pixels, a high speed worldwide network with gobs of bandwidth, ubiquitous wireless networking, yadda, yadda, yadda...
But everybody's still imitating the same old user interfaces designed in the 80's, which were drastically influenced by brutal constraints that simply do not apply any more. For years after the invention of the motion picture camera, they still used it to film plays on stage. We're still in that stage of user interface design, but it's finally beginning to change.
Component technology provides a way out of the dilema. It's too bad that Netscape failed on that front, while Microsoft has thrived. Netscape refused to support OLE/COM/ActiveX, yet they failed to provide a viable alternative. Mozilla actually uses its own cross platform version of "XPCOM" internally, yet it still doesn't support ActiveX components at the user level: Sun and Microsoft are't the only companies who sacrifice the needs of the users to the political dictates of the organization.
Sun's HotJava browser was an innovative step forward in the right direction. But instead of doing something cool like that, Netscape just changed the name of LiveScript to JavaScript in order to deceive consumers, and trotted out Java applets to play animations of dancing bears and juggling clowns. Netscape announced to great fanfair that they were now driving the Java bandwagon (to Sun's dismay), and that they were going to rewrite ther browser in 100% Pure Java, which would be much better than Internet Explorer. But they never did.
Apple's CyberDog browser was based on OpenDoc. It was the coolest demonstration of OpenDoc, that clearly justified component technology and illustrated the vast possibilities in a useful way. It was much more advanced than anything Microsoft could do with OLE.
Again, Netscape announced to great fanfair that they were going to support OpenDoc and all the wonderful lego-like features of CyberDog, which would be much better than ActiveX. But they never did.
Netscape steadfastly refused to support ActiveX because of their political beliefs, not based on the technology or the needs of the user. That might be forgivable had they ever provided a viable alternative, which they never did. Component technologies are not exclusive -- they could have supported ActiveX early on, while continuing to dabble in the art of developing their own alternatives.
Oh, Netscape certainly promised alternatives, but they never delivered. In all the time it took them to burn through their promises, what did they ever do to actually improve the user interface? All that stuff they never finished was eventually going to "enable" this wonderful new age of innovation, which we still haven't seen yet. And now we hear it's going to be another five years until anything new happens.
So I find it pretty amusing that Marc Andreessen would say that "There hasn't been any innovation on the browser in the last five years. And five years from now there won't be any changes".
This is the same guy who lost a fortune shorting the bubble, then went long just as it popped. I'd take it as a strong indication that wonderful innovations in the browser are just around the corner!
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Pop-up control. I used IE for the first time in quite awhile today. Good gods, how do people stand it?
IHNTA. IJLS "Good gods, how do people stand it?" I mean, really -- Good Gods! How do people stand it?
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
You can more easily use pie menus by clicking them up (pressing and releasing the button in the same place, moving without holding the button down, then clicking again to select), as well as with quick press-drag-release gestures. Both click-up and drag methods allow you to reselect, correct errors and cancel during tracking, and move out further from the center to gain leverage and more precise control over the selection. Other forms of gesture recognition (like handwriting) which don't allow reselection, or require you to hold down the button during the gesture, are essentially more error prone and require more coordination to use successfully.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
I hate to say it but Macromedia has created a direct data tunnel from client-side flash to server action acript which communicates with Java, Perl, CFM that allows for non-HTTP client-server communication. It's called Flash Remoting and it offers the grace of a flash GUI and the limited data-transfer of a dumb-terminal. Moreover there are more companies with similar products to be coming soon, but flash has the 98% install base. Flash client actionscripts can now directly communicate with server action script (thus your db, SOAP, EJBs etc. etc.), return just the requested data and display that data in the flash module WITHOUT RELOADING THE PAGE. Data transfer is tiny (compared to reloading a whole myYahoo page) so it's much faster than having to resend the page each time a user wants to change their hotel reservation dates or see a stock price. THIS IS A HUGE INNOVATION. and no I don't work for MM. I don't even use Flash. But non-http data-tunnels are a huge innovation.
Mandy is in red.
Body Shot 1
Body Shot 2
Body Shot 3
Body Shot 4
Either
1. You were focused on something other than what you thought were pearls (shouldn't that be PERLs here?)
2. You have much more experience with digital cameras and/or images than with actual girls
I'm assuming you're talking about the glitter that is found in everything from hand soap to lip-gloss to who-knows-what.....
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
-1 file to backup. -1 file to store on web server to access remotely. -Because it's a regular HTML file, it opens in any web browser, regardless of the filesystem it's stored on.
And WTF's so great about gratuitous animated content?
I've got all that crap disabled -- Java, Javascript, Flash, animated gifs. If I need to use it on a page, I'll selectively enable it. And when in a blue moon I have to use the 95% solution, I'm stunned at what a pile of sh*t MSIE is.
There's some good Flash art out there. Macromedia needs to provide a cross-platform standalone player for it.
Otherwise. Yes, in many ways, commercialization and exploitation of the Web's been a huge waste. The amateur and informational uses have been pretty slick though.
SCO
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Probably because his European family disowned him.
[o]_O
OS/2 has URL objects since at least 1997. They are sort files similar to Windows Internet shortcuts. The filename problem is not so big because the Workplace Shell actually shows the .LONGNAME Extended Atribute (metadata). So it includes :, / and other characters. You can even insert line breaks. The actual filename substitutes difficult characters by !. .LONGNAME can be quite long. .LONGNAME. You can put them in .zip files.
Even if you are on FAT, the
You can search by
You can drag and drop URL objects to OS/2 browsers (not all).
But, on the other side, my "bookmarks" is actually the Mozilla URL box history and Google. I still drag links to the desktop as a temporary reminder or to pass them to a download manager.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
This reminded me of a feature of old Mosaic. I hvae just filed a Mozilla bug (211531).
:)
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.
Vote for it. Code for it
4, Insightful is the least I expect. :)
a browser is a thin client, its supposed to be simple and generic i used to like nutscrape, before it sucked
Having a bookmark to Google does not make you an expert on everything.
It's unfortunate that some people have to discredit the open source community by spreading misinformation instead of trying to learn the truth. You can't fight effectively against something you don't understand, especially if the lies you believe make you think it's much worse than it is.
You're repeating a bunch of common misconceptions about ActiveX that Netscape and Sun spread in their battle against Microsoft. Unfortunately, the foolish wing of the Open Source community worshiped anything Netscape and Sun said as gospel, because they believed that their enemy's enemy is their friend.
ActiveX is not tied to Windows. It runs just fine on the Mac, Unix and other platforms. I successfully used it on the Mac in 1996. Mozilla has an open source clone of COM/ActiveX called "XPCOM", which you're using right now if you're running Mozilla.
Your claim that "the [ActiveX] security is next to nonexistent" is false, and you're spreading misinformation, which does more harm than good to the open source community.
ActiveX certainly does have quite an elaborate security model. So does Java, but it's different. ActiveX lets you implement components in any language, even Java, so the capabilities of the ActiveX control depend on the language in which it's implemented. So there's another layer of security, that Java is lacking.
ActiveX controls implemented in C++ (like this implementation of pie menus can make Win32 calls, but by default the browser is set up to require user confirmation before running the control. ActiveX components can be packaged with cryptographically signed certificates, and the user can manage which certificates they trust, reject, accept, etc.
ActiveX controls implemented in JavaScript (like this implementation of pie menus are restricted to the safe capabilities of JavaScript running in the browser. Those can download and run without requiring confirmation from the user, just like any other JavaScript code or Java applet. So it's no less secure than Java and JavaScript.
Your opinion that open source makes component technology unnecessary is extremely naive, and simply wrong. Obviously you have never written a a portable program to the gnu specification with a configure script, or looked into how that sausage factory works. Are you actually proposing doing that stuff at run-time??!
If Sun had understood the problems that ActiveX/COM was addressing, instead of ignoring them on purpose, Java would have been much more useful: easier to integrate with code written in other languages, easier to use as a plug-in application scripting language, easier to switch between different VMs, easier to write native extensions. But Sun's goal is to lock you into using "100% Pure Java", so they weren't interested in solving those problems.
Sun has finally tried to solve some of these problems (with belated and questionable success), but that was only AFTER getting their ass kicked by Microsoft and their noses rubbed in their own filth. Not only did Microsoft's Java VM beat the pants off of Sun's, but it was also deeply integrated with COM, so you could write COM components in Java, and use COM components from Java.
Sun was broadsided by the deep level of integration that Microsoft achieved with their Java VM, because Sun never even bothered to learn about COM, nor did they want to address any of the problems that COM solved. That's why Sun pushes RMI instead of CORBA, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to web services.
In a nutshell, the problem that COM solves is integrating components written in different langua
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com