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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!"
a sore loser to me...
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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It just happens to coincide with the time he left Netscape to go start his own failed company LoudCloud.
5 years ago was a great time, though. Good times.
I have been pwned because my
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.
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.
In "internet years." Next thing he'll be saying "When I was a kid, we have 256 colors, and we liked it! And only 216 of them were palette safe and that was even better!"
What about tabbed browsing and mouse gestures? Opera is still innovating with dozens of features. Now if only pages would render properly on it.
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.
Bookmarks, back and forward buttons are FINE, the real innovation is in the content, and the display of said content.
CSS, Macromedia Flash, PHP, etc are all great web innovations that continue to push the envelope.
Just because natural selection weeded out netscape doesn't mean the rest of the world stopped innovating.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
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.
Microsoft have got the market, they don't need to do any work to keep it, so why add furthur inovations to IE, no reason at all, theve even held back on full PNG support, well the work doesn't need to be done so why do it?
And everyone emulates IE....
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.
Well, I'd say that the browsers actually adhering to standards instead of doing whatever they feel like seems like an innovation... of course, adhering to standards means you can't implement every bright idea you get, so yes, it slows down the rate of change.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
Though I think that yes, fundamental concepts are out of the question and probably best left unchanged, I have to disagree that innovation is completely dead. Whenever something makes using the Internet easier and more enjoyable, I consider that innovation.
Mark's disappointed at the way Netscape turned out (bought by AOL, the anti-nerd internet company, and market share in the single digits, thanks to Microsoft).
Hey, Mark, driving a car hasn't changed significantly in about 100 years, guess why? BECAUSE IT WORKS!! I like the forward and back buttons just fine, thanks very much.
Another one: Bookmarks. How could they change? They're just places you go all time. A browser should always have these, just like a radio should always have presets. Are radios bad because they 'still have presets'?
Finally, Mark is sad because he hasn't really done anything impactful (is that a word?) since the browser. Yes, Mark, you're a one-hit wonder, but it was one hell of a hit! Don't be down on yourself, d00d.
/.: why the hell am I here?
"Navigation is an embarrassment.
I think what he meant was "Navigator is an embarassment."
Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons -- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser."
Well IE is sort of better at this, in that favorites are individual files, so you can use the filesystem's find function to search (nice when you have 1000+ bookmarks).
And I guess he hasn't seen Opera's gestures?
well, word processing hasn't changed all that much either in the last five years.
Really Mozilla is still available. If he has better ideas then he is still free to develop them himself or push others to do it. Browsing is a mature concept now. It doesn't need to constantly change.. that'd make it hard on users. If he has ideas though I'm sure people would listen.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Now you've got me bummed out again. I guess I'll go read "IT" again.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
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.
Nothing ... I think that's the point ... that was the first evidence of stagnation. Compare NS4.5 navigation to Mozilla 1.4 navigation to MSIE 3 navigation to MSIE 6 navigation and you're stuck with essentially the same model for all this time.
... damn I am trying to remember the earliest and I can't ... it started with a "D" or "Q" and was developed by the folks who made a very popular BBS terminal program ... humbug, sorry, I usually like to have my facts in line but the memory is fading) so while it is VERY nice, it's not truly new. And pop-up suppression isn't an aid to navigation, but a method to sanitize the code from the remote site.
And before people jump up and down about CSS and XHTML, remember that Andreesen was talking about browser navigation not layout technologies or other areas that are dominated by W3C.org.
I will mention that I think tab based browsing and the suppression of pop-ups have been two major boons to my browsing. However, I saw browsers with tabs back before IE 2.0 had come out (back when non-Netscape/IE/Opera/KHTML browsers were often integrated with your Winsock communications stack
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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.
As far as I can tell, the web really hasn't evolved that much either(not counting the browser). We are using the same protocols and delivering basically the same types of information that we did 5 years ago. Sure we have flash and other funky plugins to spice things up, but the backbone is still the same. How are you suppose to innovate when the set of building blocks you have to work with haven't changed? Sure you can mix them up a little and get mouse gestures and tabbing and such, but you need new building materials to work with to innovate on top of. Once we migrate off the current version of protocols that we so fondly call the Internet, and open things up some more, I'm sure we'll start to see this innovation.
-my other sig is your mom
web browsing innovation makes Netscape dead!
"Marc Andreessen told Reuters today that browser innovation ended five years ago."
In the same breath,
"Reuters told Marc Andreessen today that he should have ended five years ago."
What's up Marc?
IIRC, there were no tabs in NS4.5, and tabs are the thing I enjoy most in modern browsers. Then there is the search fields in the toolbar, very cool, plus Opera's location bar prefixs, I love being able to type 'g innovation' or 'a domain:au news' in the location bar and have a google or alltheweb search come back.
And some of the innovation is coming from web page developers rather than the browser, some java applets are getting very nice. Robust, functional etc.
And then of course there is XUL, which is IMHO brilliant, but likely to die. To be able to turn the browser into another application with a markup language is way beyond cool.
In short, I think Marc is spitting sour grapes.
>>
I am the director, and this is my movie
IMHO he's right, although I don't think NS 4.5, was the cut off point for such innovation. What he's talking about is large and dramatic innovation, not add-ons and great expansions (like Tab's, Gestures etc).
But this isn't necessary a bad thing, everyone who uses the net is currently used to using a web browser and its heuristically defined layout, back, forward, reload, home and stop. It doesn't really need (currently) to be changed, the same applies to the controls of a car, the way a book works or even mobile phone interfaces. It works this way, billions of people use it such and changing it would have to be for dramatic purposes.
It doesn't stop us refining it though (again, Tabs, Gestures), just like a car (ABS, Sat Nav, Power Steering etc).
The pr0n button! Why wade through all those annoying popups?
Except for, you know, some minor things like browser support for the DOM (which is huge), CSS (which is huger), XML, XSLT, and XHTML.
Or maybe he's just talking about the UI side, where we've seen absolutely no improvement whatsoever. Except for tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, integrated search bars, and popup blocking (though back then, popups weren't so much a problem).
Which is to say, really, that he's wrong. Sure, browser development is arguably slower now than it was back in the Navigator 1.2 Perpetual Beta days, but that's always the case -- the mad rush of innovation has to slow down after the low-hanging fruit is plucked. It certainly hasn't stopped, though.
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
I always thought that the backward and forward buttons aren't very well suited for a web. I thought one could have a browser that, as you browse, keeps a little picture of a graph of the recent links followed, so that you can jump directly to a different branch, and don't have to traverse the whole tree up and down.
It would work something like this:
google search "best web browser arround"
google lists a list of web sites. On the side you see a single node.
You click on "opera". On the side you see a node linked to one node: node->node
You click on "features. Now: node->node->node
Now you want to see something about netscape. Click on the first node in the graph. You are back to the google page. Click on "netscape". Click on version 3.0, click on features.
Now the graph displays:
node->node->node
\->node->node->node
Now you want to compare these features to the features of opera. You just click on the last node in the first subtree.
And so on....
Don't you think it makes more sense?
And it would drive all the javascript programmers, who don't even want you to use the back button, crazy - as a bonus!
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/
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?
that using a webpage requires memorization. The widgets on a webpage are quite different than those in most GUIs. They are HIGHLY customizable, and not necessarily themed to match the rest of the OS. This causes major conceptual problems for those unused to computers. The webbrowser is a totally different UI in many ways than the rest of the computer, a UI that can only be learned by memory.
Photos.
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.
Yeah, and innovation for the book died when they created the index, the table contents, and page numbering. As long as the glue that binds the book holds and the ink doesn't run when it gets wet, I'm happy.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
"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.
Of course it works, and it's optimum given the limitations of the medium, but why should that stop "innovation."
We wanna change shit, dammit!
I like Pete Seeger's definition of "sophmoric." The itch to be unique.
There are an awful lot of sophmoric developers out there, and they're producing a lot of sophmoric software.
Please note that the word "sophmoric" is derogatory. Software that's "unique" and "innovative" isn't a good thing. Software that's A Good Thing is a good thing, even if it's the same old shit.
Sometimes especially if it's the same old shit. Even if that puts some of your jobs at risk.
KFG
But it's apparent that the innovation is gone. Microsoft has said that they will no longer develop IE as a standalone browser (and IE hasn't really changed since IE4).
Konqueror is a grouping of tools similar to IE but they are focused more on standards compliance.
The only real innovation that needs to happen is movement towards complying with W3C standards. Everyone in the web development industry would like that novel innovation of not having to develop web sites that work in only a set of browsers. Or, even worse, gimping their web sites so that they render correctly in all web browsers.
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.
2. Inline image zooming
3. Right-click dictionary lookups
4. Automated (possibly encrypted) proxy chains
5. Less feature bloat
Ok, I guess #5 pretty much invalidates the other 4.
Well IE is sort of better at this, in that favorites are individual files, so you can use the filesystem's find function to search (nice when you have 1000+ bookmarks).
Oh, I hate that one-file-per-bookmark idea. You aren't allowed to call the bookmark whatever you want -- why did they disallow characters like '?' or ':', instead of BASE64-encoding them or something? And these days it's not so bad, because most people are running FAT32 or something better, but back in the day there were a lot of people running FAT16, and on a 2GB disk partition, each bookmark used up 32KB of storage! Yikes!
I'd rather just have a non-sucky UI for finding inside the bookmarks file. (I've just started using Mozilla Firebird and so far the bookmarks searching seems pretty good.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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?
...because the number of software patents alone in the 1990s would have given him a heart attack.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
well I'm glad he thinks browser innovation is dead. now how about they start working on properly supporting things like CSS!
So incredibly annoying building a page to perfect standards and having a browser munge it anyways!
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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
Radial Context Menus + Tabbed Browsing Extensions for Firebird (Mozilla) browser are the most radical leap forward in surfing efficiency since the invention of the browser.
Nothing has come close to increasing speed, efficiency and general surfing pleasure as these two items, combined and tuned to perfection.
Andreesen is obviously majorly deluded, and the publishers of the article are obviously morons.
Your browsing appears inefficent, why not try...
I'd continue but its making me feel ill.
--
othy
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.
"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.
Flash is currently the best format for animated content on the internet.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If there were no Flash, there would be no Homestar Runner. And that would truly be a sad thing.
Browser integration is not dead! Microsoft works on it everyday. MS constantly innovates new features that crash Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera but provide no value. Innovation will truly end when we can no longer use any browser other than IE and at the rate things are doing it won't be long.
... ) As you can tell I am not the least bit bitter. I hate tools that generate bloated, crappy, IE specific HTML laden with self destructing Java script.
I would ask all the developers out there to support more than IE on your extranets. I am talking to YOU Mr. Webdeveloper in that Fortune 100 company like Ford, GM, Diamler, EBAY (Is Ebay Fortune 500 yet?). Ask yourself this, "Do I really want to limit the web to a Microsoft ONLY browser?" The point of the web was platform independence. I especially love developers who code in Java then create an O/S specific dependency.
Think about this next time you decide to implement a feature that only works in IE but provides little to no value to the end user experience. If we all wake up one morning and find we are living in a "one-browser", "one-platform" world, it is going to be horrible. However, if it makes you feel any better, I fight these battles every year and lose to the developers. Usually the management will wine and say, "it costs too much to develop for two browers" or "but if I can just let developers wiggle the mouse and use a tool to generate HTML they won't have to think and can get my project done faster".
However, web browers in general suck for application development. I think the old mainframe character terminal had better input screen capability than the modern web browers. In fact, if you compare the two they work just about the same (Push screen to terminal/browser from, Fill In Screen, send screen back to server, repeat
The whole "embrace and extend" concept is getting old. Can't we all just get along and make things better instead of creating a fragmented incompatible mess. A company like MS is sitting on piles of cash, the likes of which the world has never seen and instead of putting together a Bell Labs or Xerox Parc they spend their cash on marketing and lawyers. There are so few great men in our age and even fewer visionaries. I was holding out a glimmer of hope for Bill when he took over as chief software architect. So much for Utopia.
"There is nothing new under the sun." -Solomon
You made me feel like a really really old man now, when I was a kid we didn't have no fancy 256 colors. We had 16 colors on a Commodore 64, and we liked it. Btw, I'm 24.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Using files for this stuff is a very UNIX-y way of doing things. Putting them all in one bit formatting database is a very Microsoft-y way of doing things (a la the Windows Registry). Odd that with bookmarks they're backwards.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
To argue that innovation died back in 1998 is to ignore much of the progress Opera and Mozilla have made and continue to make. Both Opera and Mozilla offer new features like tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking. No, there hasn't been anything earthshattering, but we have seen many refinements of the general idea. The refinements are significant enough, in my opinion at least, to make Internet Explorer or even an old Netscape Communicator seem primitive in comparison. Andreessen's funny assertion that innovation is dead reminds me of a story I once heard (and whose truth I question, but I digress) about some European country that, towards the end of the 19th century, had a government that voted on closing down its patent offices. Why? Because everything that would ever be invented had already been invented. Of course, we would look back on that and think it is absurd. To me, Andreessen's logic is really no different - it is bullish and stubborn. Or, as another reader so aptly put it, bitter.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, this isn't well thought out at all.
Javascript, more properly DHTML, is amazingly better than it was at the height of the browser wars. Compare Danny Goodman's DHTML Definitive Guide 1st and 2nd editions. The first one is all about how to handle the differences between Netscape and MS. The 2nd is all about documenting the *standard* DOM and how to script it. MUCH easier than it was 5 years (or 3 years) ago.
Java applets are slow -- no argument there, but hello? Sun? Java is controlled nearly as tightly as Flash. And if you read Macromedia's marketing, they're basically presenting Flash as the Visual Basic of the web. Love or hate VB, it certainly made it easier to build applications. Something similar for the web would have a similar effect -- increased ability for developers to write great apps and increasingly crappy code from non-developers who think they're developers since easy GUI tools lower the barrier to entry for development projects.
Abuse of the technology -- cookie abuse, popups, etc -- is not the fault of the browser. tech is tech, use is use.
And I'm no fan of Microsoft, but Internet Explorer is a *great* browser. Again, wind the clock back 5, or even 3 years. And 6.x is now the last of it's kind before MS rolls it back into the OS.
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).
16 colors?! I remember back when we had 2 colors, green and black - and by golly we were happy to have those!
Speaking of cool xul, check out robin . I have no idea what to do with it (yet) but it is certainly cool.
I remember backmin 1970, we had all the color, and sounds sent to us, into our home, for free! Megabits per second streaming seamlessly into our homes. ;)
Granted, it was only one way
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
browsing for porn. Would you like to:
a) View quality free XXX sites
b) Optimize your mouse/keyboard for better one-handed surfing
c) Find out how to clear your cache before mom comes home
Exactly. I would much rather see browsers considered mature technology while getting their standards correct then more tacked on 'enhancements.'
I don't want a browser that's secretly a P2P app.
I don't want embedded media and plug-ins crashing it.
I don't want a browser that is also a PIM.
I don't want a little avatar asking me if I want to go to shamelessmarketers.com.
etc.
Why does everything have to be attached to the browser? A simple interface and a stable platform is what companies should be aiming for, with the exception of tweaks and minor enhancements like pop-up blocking, tabs, etc.
The Mozilla team has learned from this mistake. People kept complaining about the "Mozilla Suite" and the bloat and they responded by announcing plans to seperate the browser from the suite.
Microsoft in the meantime continues its "the browser is the desktop" nonsense which mixes WAN data with the OS. As we've seen with ActiveX, vbs, etc this is a security nightmare.
I'm not sure what Andreesen was secretly planning, but an url box, back/forward buttons, and a stop button are surprisingly effecient when dealing with html-based technologies.
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?
I'm giving up my mod points so I hope the other moderators will mod up the parent.
I cannot agree enough with your post. I just finished an application written entirely in DOM, CSS, and Javascript. The HTML frames are generated entirely out of Javascript code. No "regular" HTML is sent to the client.
I kept to bare W3C DOM objects and methods, such as addChild, document.createElement, and so forth. Guess what?
It works in IE 6+, Mozilla (+derivatives), Safari, and others. No browser detection. No special coding. No hacks.
Also, note that this is a full blown web-based application so I feel justified in asking my users to upgrade their browsers. I wouldn't do this on a home page or regular site that people visit. Eventually we can expect 6+ browsers for home pages, but not yet.
Also also, despite my thinking the app is pretty cool in its dynamic interfaces, I can't say enough how much of a screwed up language Javascript is. The companies have really screwed us this time. It's a pain to debug. It's a pain to write (being combined with another server-side language, python in my case).
It's too bad that I think DHTML is the future. I really do think it will make it because it achieves dynamic content without plugins. I just wish it was cleaner. Perhaps IE will finally suppor W3C standards and the language/DOM support will clean up as time goes on. I'm hoping but not holding my breath...
...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?
Well I think that perhaps a great innovation in the web and web browsing in general is the use of the web browser as a platform for remote applications.. i.e. email over the web, blogs, ebay, blah blah, etc. The web browser has reached the highest level of 'fitness' (though small improvements are being made constantly) that it needs to basically disappear and let innovation happen in server-side applications. Think of it like DNA. The process that DNA goes through to produce proteins has no need to change...all of the "innovation" is happening at a higher level.
But, I think there is also reams of innovation happening on the web, and based on HTTP and XML (the simple building blocks that someone else said stifled innovation because they weren't improving).
Big E.G.: The Apple Music Store. All of the guts are web based, and iTunes just renders stuff (using Apple's WebKit renderer (Safari) i believe) based on XML it receives from Apple's servers. I have no idea how they handle the downloading, but there's no reason why they don't just use HTTP(S) as well.
Think of RSS (and consequently news aggregators), XML-RPC/SOAP (REST, MIME-RPC). Not all of these show up in the web browser, but things like RSS have great potential for it (and if it weren't for firewalls, i think peer-to-peer web stuff would also be blossoming). I think that "semantic" improvements to the web based on RDF are going to start happening a lot, and web browsers will improve because of it. Well, maybe just Google. But like I said, web apps like Google are the innovation.
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
In other news, W3C standards support has been greatly improving for the past five years, ever since the horrid crapfest that was Netscape 4.5.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
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
I don't know how many times I've backed up on a path, gone down some other path, then wanted to get back to where I was. I could back up to the fork point, but didn't have any "Forward" options other than where I just came from.
Just use the "History" window. Select the menu item "View: Explorer Bar: History", and you'll see all the pages that you have visted.
- 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.
640 KB is almost enough for anyone
The lunatic is in my head
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?
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 . . .
If the things they "had in mind" were anything like their context-destroying Frame model, or their DTD-breaking Object substitute Embed: Good riddance.
Why didn't they implement proper support for Link relationships? Why did they feel the need to make their own Java security model? Why did they hack their own Javascript-based styling instead of just implementing CSS properly?
The software industry is better off without them. A worse case of "Not Invented Here" mentality is hard to find.
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.
The thing Marc Andreessen does not say is that all the innovation is not around HTML anymore. It's RSS, Echo (well, soon :), two way communications in Blogs (Trackback, Pingback, Referrer lists, etc), FOAF, GeoURL, etc.
For the moment, all these higher level ideas are being integrated into web pages, because the browsers aren't using them (except for RSS readers).
Today's browsers are the user interface to HTML. We still have to invent the user interface for these technologies. They are the next layer of the web.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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