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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!"
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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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.
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.
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.
washed up?
are you kidding man, he practically made http a household name.
even if he did nothing else, he did something that impacted human kind.
what have you done lately?
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.
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.
You mean Opsware. Marc's a nice guy though. We're his next door neighbors and used to see him quite a bit across the street at Hobee's. He's probably still got his table there....
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
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.
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
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/
I don't understand how his is innovation in terms of navigation at all. The web browsers navigation system is the same whether you're using the keyboard, mouse, or even mouse gestures... it's simply another input method. Throwing in voice commands or a touch screen to navigate doesn't change the fact that you're still using back, forward, and history.
In my opinion, Anderson's opinion is quite accurate if perhaps somewhat blunt. Just consider how narrow the subset of graphs, representing a user browsing the web that our current browser history model encompasses. Even the simple case where someone browses a few links deep then decides to go back a few links and browse a different topic looses quiet a bit of information. That difference alone affects browser usage patterns.
Personally, I haven't seen any significant change in the browser navigation system for even longer than Anderson is suggesting. Certainly there have been some nice incremental changes to UI and encoding schemas, but navigation itself has been untouched for... well, longer than I care to remember.
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
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?
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.
"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.
A Microsoftie ("thrall") at work says I'm a Zealot because I don't use I.E. I try to explain that Mozilla is quite simply, just better, and provide examples from tabs, to low numbers of security issues, to standard compliance, to pop-up blocking, cookie management, etc. He doesn't buy it.
When we see each other in the hallway, he says "Zealot!", and I say "fanboy!"
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
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?
"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.
I have the following gestures I use all the time:
/.)
back
forward
reload
open a link in a new tab
open a blank tab
home (google)
close window/tab
view source
and 4 user defined gestures that open frequented sites (including
add the default click and right click for the context menu gives you 14 functions. Next time you find a 14 function mouse, you let me know, okay?
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
Interesting story: When I was a freshman in college in 1997, our second C/C++ course project was to write a bookmark manager for netscape style bookmarks.html. With search, add, delete, folders and subfolders, etc.
It's really not that difficult. If a bunch of CS freshmen can do it in 1997, it makes you wonder what is going on with major browser development.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
I _work_ at Microsoft (I'm a dev) and I don't use IE. I use Avant Browser + Outlook at work and Mozilla at home.
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.
its crashy and unresponsive way more often than IE
On a Windows box, the best way to browse is to open IE
With:
??
What you say used to be true (or almost true - Opera has been a better browser than IE since at least version 6), but I suspect you haven't used a recent version of Mozilla on Windows. It's neither ugly nor slow (well, Firebird isn't ugly).
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).
Why would you want something so primative as a web browser when you had Hypercard? If Apple had included the ability to link to and run Hypercard stacks from the Internet back in the 80's, the World Wide Web may have been a very different place today.
Of course it's hard to blame Apple for this little shortcoming, as the Internet wasn't even known to anyone outside of academia when Hypercard was being activly developed.
...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?
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.
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
- 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.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.
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.
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.
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.
Most people browse in userland, and thus don't care about the technical details behind a window manager.
They sure do care when they get the "Your system resources are running low" dialog box, and they continue to get it even after quadrupling the RAM in the machine, because the Windows 9x resource heap is limited to 65536 bytes for user.exe and 65536 bytes for gdi.exe no matter how many megabytes of physical RAM are available. Tabs are more resource-efficient than windows.
KDE, OS/2 and Windows 3.1 via thrid party apps had multiple desktops long before Mozilla existed
If multiple desktops are so cool, then why have user interface experts working for a major computer company discarded multiple desktops as too confusing?
Will I retire or break 10K?
"...still the same. use mouse, click, point,type..."
Sure, and cars also haven't evolved since the beginning of the last century.
Better hardware support doesn't count, nor does faster cars. One can see more cars than before, design is slightly improved, but roads are still the same to end users and car seats look still the same as they were. Yes there have been small changes in the background...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Rent went crazy. My 6 room apartment at Bush & Pine, a nice sunny area, was $1,200 a month in 1996. In 1998 that'd get you a studio.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
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