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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.
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.
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
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.
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?
"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.
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.
...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 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.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.
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.
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.