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Netscape Founder Says Web Browsing Innovation Dead
mattOzan writes "Marc Andreessen told Reuters today that browser innovation ended five years ago (which would put us at about Navigator 4.5 beta -- what was so innovative about that? The "What's Related" button? Beatnik integration?) "Navigation is an embarrassment. Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons -- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser." Well, pass me the NDA and tell me what they were!"
Browser innovation died with the rise of spyware/adware/etc. That caused browser innovations to be used against the end-user, so the innovations are negated.
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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
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!"
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.
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.
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
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).
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?
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>
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
Your browsing appears inefficent, why not try...
I'd continue but its making me feel ill.
--
othy
It is stumping to try and reinvent the browsers as we know it, or even to innovate. I compare browsing to the mechanics of reading a book: Book -> TOC -> Chapters -> Pages... if ya wanna get fancy, then throw in an index or bib.
With that mindset, viewing web pages are the equivalent to turning pages... not many different ways to absorb the content.
There is more room to innovate on the web-design level than with the browsing software. Sounds like he was pissed off because he couldn't reinvent the wheel.
Trivial Omnipotence
If there were no Flash, there would be no Homestar Runner. And that would truly be a sad thing.
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
Take a look at The Brain for an innovation in browsing. I'd like to see more sites adopt this sort of navigation scheme. Something that's always bothered me about browsers (I use IE primarily, as I'm one of those unfortunates that is locked into Windows) is the disgusting underuse of the "Forward" button. 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.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Yeah, and I *hate* that. 90+% of the PDF documents I come across could have been done just as well in HTML, where the user has control over font size and the text isn't artifically constrained to a "page" view which makes no sense whatsoever when reading on a monitor.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
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...
I compare browsing to the mechanics of reading a book: Book -> TOC -> Chapters -> Pages... if ya wanna get fancy, then throw in an index or bib.
With that mindset, viewing web pages are the equivalent to turning pages...
Right, except that if the average web site was a book, a third of the pages would be ripped, another third pissed on and finally a third with page after page of "EnglishScript error on line 4 of page 451. Do you want to debug?"
...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
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
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.
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.