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!"

Comments

Internet

[Luigi30]

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.

Re:Internet

[sniggly]

Try mozilla firebird and all the great plugins available for it, tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, popup blocking...

And no spyware/adware, and it runs on windows and more platforms.

I guess Andreesen when talking about all the innovations he "had in mind" he meant tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, popup blocking... I guess he was lucky to be in netscape at the time, most of what he did afterwards kind of failed miserably.

some quick ones

[ywwg]

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.

How I'd improve bookmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not true.

[Cebu]

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.

So what's your next big idea for Mozilla, then?

[derinax]

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?

Re:Whats wrong with current browsers?

[Revenge013]

It is stumping to try and reinvent the browsers as we know it, or even to innovate. I compare browsing to the mechanics of reading a book: Book -> TOC -> Chapters -> Pages... if ya wanna get fancy, then throw in an index or bib.

With that mindset, viewing web pages are the equivalent to turning pages... not many different ways to absorb the content.

There is more room to innovate on the web-design level than with the browsing software. Sounds like he was pissed off because he couldn't reinvent the wheel.

UI changes != innovations!

[Shadowlore]

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.