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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.
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.
"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
"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).
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.
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/
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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
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.
How can you lack the coordination for gestures? There is no coordination! Just hold down the button and drag. You don't have to make it pretty.
The real beauty of tabbed browsing is not the tabs, but features that they make possible. It would be cumbersome to implement multiple home pages, grouped bookmarks, or opening a link in the background with a middle click in a non-tabbed browser. Also, I would consider Mozilla's Type Ahead Find, Opera's FastForward, and Safari's SnapBack, and IE/Mozilla's sidebars to be recent innovative browsing features.
As for great new features in the web overall, you shouldn't need to look too far. CSS, JavaScript, PNG, MathML (eventually), etc. have all made it much easier to create much more complex interactive sites than it would have been in NS1.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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.
ppfft! Back in my day we only had black!
And sometimes not even that!
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.
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
I can't believe that was modded as insightful. UNIX tends to use a single configuration file for a single purpose. You rarely see a 100+ files to manage an application. The bookmark file for a browser is just a configuration file. When MS moved to make the web browser the file manager, they decided to cut out the code for managing bookmarks, and let the file management portion of the code do the work. The windows registry is not a unique concept. Just check out AIX, and you will see the ODM database is very similiar(don't I remember an old partnership between IBM and MS. They couldn't have stolen the idea, could they have?). The difference is a corrupt ODM will not prevent me from booting the machine. It can be rebuilt in single user mode at the very least, and the applications still store thier own settings. A horked windows registry equates to a useless windows system.
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.
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.
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.