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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!"
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.
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.
What does PHP stand for?
PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. This confuses many people because the first word of the acronym is the acronym. This type of acronym is called a recursive acronym. The curious can visit Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing for more information on recursive acronyms.
source: php.net FAQ
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.
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.
What does PHP stand for?
That's a recent re-invention... it originally stood for Personal Home Page.
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
Try either black and white, or Opera.
Basicly you "draw" an L with the left mouse button down, and it will go back, draw _| and you go forward. Very usefully, esp. when you can do 'em at the OS level, like BeOS could (with a plug in) and now MacOS X & I think a Linux app does the same.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Mozilla 1.4 added a 'read ahead' ability that downloads the links while it is idle. Its under Advanced, Cache (I believe it defaults to on).
I think that Opera also has the capability.
The Anti-Blog
It's called "prefetching" by the mozilla developers (and no, it's not like when yer real drunk and you say "hey, she's pre' fetching" mozilla.org FAQ on Prefetching
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.
How can you lack the coordination for gestures? There is no coordination! Just hold down the button and drag. You don't have to make it pretty.
The real beauty of tabbed browsing is not the tabs, but features that they make possible. It would be cumbersome to implement multiple home pages, grouped bookmarks, or opening a link in the background with a middle click in a non-tabbed browser. Also, I would consider Mozilla's Type Ahead Find, Opera's FastForward, and Safari's SnapBack, and IE/Mozilla's sidebars to be recent innovative browsing features.
As for great new features in the web overall, you shouldn't need to look too far. CSS, JavaScript, PNG, MathML (eventually), etc. have all made it much easier to create much more complex interactive sites than it would have been in NS1.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Speaking of cool xul, check out robin . I have no idea what to do with it (yet) but it is certainly cool.
CSS, Flash and PHP aren't browser innovations.
How is CSS not a browser innovation? Can you tell me what CSS would be worth if not for CSS support in browsers?
--Asa
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?
Agreed, I always found the forward button to be pretty much useless. However, once I found tabs, both the forward and back buttons are (metaphorically) rusting from disuse. If I come across an interesting link I just open it in a new tab. Hardly ever a reaon t ogo back or forward. I highly recommend you check out Mozilla, they of course have a Windows version.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
I use mouse gestures in nearly all of the applications I use, not just the browser. It's kinda sad that Windows and Linux don't have a nice system wide and application configurable gesture input device like us OS X peops do.
It's called Cocoa Gestures, it's been out for nearly two years and hasn't been updated in nearly that long but it works so amazingly well. If only the rest of the apps for OS X were also Cocoa based... man is it sweet though.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
No, zooming is another thing.
Specifying a minimum font size is very good. Also, it's a pain in the a** to use load a pdf when the only contents of it was some product specs and a picture.
PDF and (more importantly) Flash is totally overrated. They're what stopped innovation. Tabbed browsing, css support and Mouse Gestures (!!!) are features that brought browsing to the next level. Flash just stopped designing nice pages in html that scaled well back to a text-based browser. Proper HTML is viewed well in Lynx, whereas a pdf/swf is not.
Gestures-- ehh, same stuff , just different mouse movements---
I don't know about making the browser smarter about content...
Tabs are cool, but don't really solve anything, they just use less resources, and
less screen real-estate
How about alternatives to bookmarks? The cache-like systems sounds cool.
Here's a couple of ideas I've had, that I won't probably ever contribute to Mozilla or
whatever, so here goes:
1. A next-queue. Option to Click and the link is stored to be visited "next". You could then read the whole story, and rather than opening new windows or tabs , select queue-link, then when you're done, click/select next-link. The fact that we don't have this is why users open too many windows, this is what the user-wants, but opening another window is currently the only way to get it.
2. Temporary Bookmarks that age and go away by themselves. Need's to be easy to do, not 3levels deep or in some bookmark manager tool thing, but as easy, and as accessable as making a regular bookmark. If anything make it harder to make regular
bookmarks. I'd say 75% of my bookmarks, are temporary, and inside of 2 weeks, I don't want them, but I'd have to visit them again before I delete them, just to be sure.
And then I never do that.. Sometimes, I'll save to disk, just because I know I'll clean it up, soon, if its on my desktop.
3. OR MAYBE even better , if the page is bookmarked, change all "bookmark this" page, to an option that would allow you to easily delete the bookmark... and it would show that you are on a bookmarked page somewhere. This might not be a bad thing to but on the bottom near the security lock icon. (and, of course you could click on that icon and
quickly delete the bookmark from the popmenu tied to that icon)
4. Browsing-Threads/ threads, kinda like tabs, kinda of like the cache-idea, but more like a "project" from a developer enviroment. Every window would be saved, history would be seperate, bookmarks could be "thread local", sessions could be saved , and restored at will, again like a project.
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 . . .
I'm really honestly not sure what PDF viewer you are using but... since when don't you have control over font size? I mean, I'm only familiar with Adobe Acrobat and xpdf but... come on buddy! It's called zoom! :)
Last time I checked, zooming does not rewrap lines, so you also need to scroll horizontaly.
(I don't believe that changing font sizes will ever be a feature of Acrobat's as the idea is that PDFs look and print the same everywhere)
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:Well arnt you the clever little sarcastic??
I'm not certain, but I think Opera's "Rewind" and "Fast Forward" buttons do much the same thing as you're describing. They'll take you to the root of the site (i.e. slashdot.org) from wherever, rather than going "back" ten steps or whatever.
I don't use it much (yet) but when I do, I keep on thinking "Must use that more often".
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Although the free version of Opera still has adware. The BBC had a piece about "free" software vs. paid-for software recently, which covered the entire adware thing.
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
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.
IBM Webexplorer for OS/2 had this, except it was a button you pressed to bring up the Webmap.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
dave