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Netscape Founder Says Web Browsing Innovation Dead

Posted by timothy on from the 640k dept.

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!"

12 of 895 comments (clear)

  1. Not true. by Mmm+coffee · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Not true. by addaon · · Score: 4, Informative

      The best way, in my opinion, to teach gestures is by pie menus. They're basically the same thing. Let's say that we have gestures that distinguish between 8 directions (N, NE, E, SE...), and are brought up by clicking the right button and gesturing. In "teach mode", clicking the right button should bring up a pie menu, with the eight slices marked in some manner. (Note that this requires gestures to have some pattern to their meaning.) So, if forward is N, E and back is N, W.... both of those gestures could be done normally, but in teach mode the N label on the menu would say "Navigation", for instance... going in the direction would bring up another pie menu, with E as forward, W as back, and maybe S as home. So by selecting things from these familiar hierarchical menus, you're learning into muscle memory the movements that work in gesture mode, when you remove the visual cues. Make sense?

      --

      I've had this sig for three days.
  2. Web Browser or Standards by waldoiverson · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. iRider has interesting navigation by e271828 · · Score: 4, Informative
    From the article:
    Navigation is an embarrassment. Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons -- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser.
    Besides the use of tabs that most /.ers are familiar with now, there are also other new approaches to navigation as evidenced by the iRider browser. It's IE based, non-free, and Windows only, but they have some nice ideas. In particular, they have a left hand navigation pane that shows all visited websites in a tree fashion (with thumbnails), that works quite well.
  4. Re:Not really... by resin8 · · Score: 3, Informative
    the first P stants for PRE

    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

  5. 1998 - Good Times by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:Not really... by checkitout · · Score: 4, Informative

    What does PHP stand for?

    That's a recent re-invention... it originally stood for Personal Home Page.

  7. Innovation is getting more subtle by steveha · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  8. Re:Some features I would like to see by Christianfreak · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  9. Re:Some features I would like to see by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  10. Re:Slow and minor innovation by damiam · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.

    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.
  11. iRider by jbrandon · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 . . .