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A Peek at AT&T's New Browser, Pogo
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica takes a look at Pogo, a browser from AT&T with new features like a 3-D history and bookmark view. The browser's currently in a private beta and Ars' comments aren't all necessarily glowing — particularly in the areas where performance is concerned. 'It requires Windows XP SP2 or later or Windows Vista, and its minimum hardware are surprisingly steep: a 1.6GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a video card with at least 256MB of VRAM. Seem like a bit much for a web browser? It is, and as we found out, these requirements posed some major challenges for us during our testing.'"
SBC's old browser was lousy too.
That's up to half the RAM on the typical home system. Falling back on Moore's law doesn't help when your requirements are looking two years down the road.
Firefox works fine for me. It's good enough.
in fact, it sounds like it's going to be a bit of a stinker.
Perhaps they should rename it to Pongo.
(Sorry)
Summation 2
Anyone on the inside have any details on how this works? Sounds like a gmail-type thing to me. If so, someone hook me up!
Another "idea" in AT&T unique style. The only way is if Compiz and Mozilla guys could borrow some ideas.
And people complain about firefox being bloated? You should not need a dedicated graphics card to check your email.
Speaking of Compiz, is there any sort of "libcompiz" that lets developers use the effects from Compiz within their apps?
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Since it doesn't run on Linux it will never achieve widespread mainstream acceptance on the desktop.
I want it to report simultaneously to the DHS and the NSA, when I change my vest and underpants.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
unless shdwdoc.dll has been ported to Linux
all these "new" Windows browsers are usually just an IE activeX control embedded in a VB container
same IE engine with all the same vunerabilities, even the bigname AV's (mcafee/symantec) use the dll for dialogs
of course the fastest way to ruin an AV and Windows is simply delete the dll
no AV, no anti-spyware, no security, no web browser (no telnet as that is not installed on Vista by default)
poof all gone with a single dll
I don't mind any attempt at innovation, and I certainly welcome competition in the browser market. If someone thinks they have ideas about how to make things better, then let them have a go.
It's pretty clear that this is intended for the home user with a nice new 2008-9 computer, who doesn't really run much else. So from that point of view, the requirements are probably fine, and at least it lets them actually use the computing power that they have. Other people have other options, nothing lost.
Uh, and RTFA? You must be joking.
I work with a guy who believes that the reason Apple succeeds is that they accelerate the graphics with hardware. This gives them the ability to do transitions like Expose on the desktop and the smooth sliding on devices like the iPhone.
Pogo seems to be along the same lines. But where Apple's eye candy is functional, the Pogo eye candy looks like flashy for the sake of flashy. The 3D UI looks nice, but it's about as functional as Vista's Windows-Tab app selector.
I don't particularly like Apple, but they do seem to have strong design concepts. The design follows the function in their products, as far as I understand. But Pogo looks like they implemented it because the technology was cool, not because they had some difficult problem to solve.
We decided once again to step it up and run Pogo on a dual-processor Opteron 256 with two 3GHz CPUs, 4GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA 8800 GT video card with 512MB of VRAM. From here, we were finally able to use Pogo enough to actually find out how well it works--for the most part, anyway.
I only wish I had a gaming rig that fast
Are they doing the UI in canvas 3D?
The moz key bindings still work so I doubt they simply embedded Gecko. Perhaps a JIT (tamarin) would make the UI usable?
Seriously, WHY?
ONE gig of RAM is sufficient to play most current computer games, and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say those are way more complex than a browser.
Who gave the developers machines good enough that they thought these requirements were fine? They should have to use their own browser while using budget PCs that are prime candidates for next year's thin clients.
Wow, I'll be able to quickly remember on which page I saw that awesome set of ... uhm ... drivers, yeah, that's it drivers.
On the plus side, it reports all your browsing activity to AT&T.
AT&T
Your world delivered
(to us)
So, I'll need special glasses to see my history?
Walt Kelly was right: "we have met the enemy, and he is us".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
If anyone believes that AT&T can be trusted for protecting your privacy; check yourself into the mental hospital right now. Given AT&T's track record, I would never install this. The big question is if they try to make it mandatory to install this to use their network. Not a far-fetched idea.
Just think of it as client-side VRML.
I'm sure this one will take off just as quickly.
Complaining about a private beta not being fast or working in less than the minimum requirements isn't really fair. The reviewer spends the first half of the review complaining that it doesn't run on hardware less than the requirements, doesn't run on the mac.. and by the way they could of added that it doesn't run on the iPhone, their GPS nor the 1980-era walkman that they own.
It's a beta, designed to show some concepts and trials. The released software can be sped up or modified. Why not review the features that are included. Presumably, importing bookmarks isn't a core feature for a beta.
Although, I'm unlikely to switch browsers (seeing no reason to switch from a fully patched IE 7 running as non-administrator on Vista), it's great that there is still competition in the browser market.
Following the successful, and well reviewed by ./ readers, model that Apple used to gain browser market share, AT&T could automatically download the browser as part of a "software update" for AT&T phones. When you visit the AT&T wireless site, they could require the option to upgrade your phone (and without warning install the new AT&T browser).
Hey, if it worked for Apple, it should work for AT&T.
2GB? Really. This business of storing full resolution images of pages is silly.
Sure, you can buy 2GB of RAM, but perhaps you might like to use it for something useful while the web browser is running.
We're approaching the point where web browsers won't run on a 32-bit machine.
Why in God's name would I want to run an AT&T browser? It probably automatically forwards all your activity to the NSA, and has built-in net-nonneutrality support.
..since I'm an AT&T customer, it feels like there are two unasked questions.
1.) What is AT&t going to do to make sure that this is the only browser that I use? Certainly something more than a silly EULA. How about automated litigation if I step a foot off Ma Bell's Farm?
2.) What can Bell do to offer me more choice with their browser? In other words how can they help me by blocking anything other than a heavily proxied port 80. Mail, it should sit on AT&T's webmail, where they own it and copyright whatever I say. FTP, thats for terrorists. We need more choices, you know, like cable TV.
Crysis!
So it's VisualFlow (http://www.mee.com.sa/sony-vaio/SoftwareImages/Cr8tvSoftware/Photos/vf_04.gif) for your bookmarks? /pass
AT&T is doing a terrible job just connecting our phonecalls and TCP/IP streams without spying on us or holding it for ransom to Net Doublecharge. It should spend more time getting that right before it wastes the revenue for that basic service which we're paying it every month on bloated browsers that just create demand for more expensive Windows and PC upgrades.
AT&T used to have Bell Labs, which did do basic research that wasn't just to connect calls cheaper and more reliably (and safe from snooping). But AT&T sold it off to get out of the innovation business. Let's see them stick to their mission better before stepping off that path to basic profitability.
--
make install -not war
Judging by the screenshots, it looks like some AT&T execs happened to catch a marathon of those 1990s cyber-thrillers which featured portrayals of that mysterious new "Internet" thing that was starting to get noticed, and decided the real Internet should start looking like those Hollywood mockups.
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http://www.pogobrowser.com/
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Sounds like the browser they used to make you install with your DSL, which was always bloated and sucked ass.
I'm sorry but an internet provider should never write software...especially a web browser!
If all I get for that kind of performance requirements is fancy light shows I'm going to put my precious hardware resources someplace else Thankyouverymuch.
There is a social gaming site that is named Pogo. pogo.com. I think it is tied to AOHell somehow. I wonder who is going to win the naming rights in this contest.
Lex turns to the clueless paleontologists, "This is Pogo! I know this!"
[
Hmm, I wonder how much help AT&T is getting from the NSA in designing this backdoor, er, browser?
There's no taste for accounting.
Seriously, are they such control freaks that they feel they must control the *entire* online experience of their users? Did that work for AOL (or CompuServe, or ...) in the long term?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
There are so many browsers derived from Firefox, yet the core itself is getting worse with each new release. Firefox 2.0.0.13, which I'm using, likes to go braindead at random intervals, anywhere between 10 and 45 minutes, at which point I have to restart it. The Javascript likes to use 100% CPU and freeze the whole damned browser. The whole add-on system is getting polluted with whiney half-bred gadgets that can't do anything right.
Don't get me wrong, Firefox is still my favorite, but I think there's a lot of work still to be done before we should run off adding random bling like AT&T has done. The priority should be to fix problems before creating new ones.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I wonder which browser's packets get priority. I can see ATT giving preference to their browser and degrading the competition preform in transit.
Windows Vista Help Forum
So, this may be a Beta, and that's all well and good. Beta versions of things are allowed to have missing features and all of that stuff, but the probability that it's memory usage drops to an eight h of the current requirement is extremely low. That's not how software development works, if you want something to be efficient you start by designing it that way. Maybe you use a slow inefficent algorithm here or there in modularized boxes, but MAN that would have to be a crappy algorithm.
My only real problem with firefox as-is is that it uses too much ram. What it actually does should require maybe 5-50MB or so, depending on the features used, and then however much cache you want. I might want 100MB of cache, and 50MB for java-script to leak memory like a seive, the footprint should be about 200MB or so. Note though that the BASE footpring, the requirement to run the program is more like 50-100MB. These sort of numbers already give them a HUGE amount of latitude for poor implementation and biasing heavilly towards using more memory to speed things up. It simply does take that much. I can run a full Linux install with a minimal webbrowser, a GUI (not KDE), and an IM client in 32MB of ram on a 206MHz arm. When given another 200MB of ram (6 times what ALL of gnu/linux was using), I really should be able to have a full-featured browser.
It seems like Apple would be able to make Safari take advantage of some of the "features" AT&T is touting for Pogo easily. They've already got coverflow working well in iTunes ao I'd guess you could transport that into Safari. Just have a low-res "screengrab" happen whenever you visit a site, you would instantly have that sort of ability available to you in the history or your bookmarks if you were to bookmark it... And I like the idea of an _option_ to have my tabs a little bigger and show that screen grab of the site instead of the teeny-weeny favicon.ico logos and title text.
I just don't see how adding a couple things like that would bog down the browser experience that much. Did Ars leave out a major thing? Where's the 3d experience? Is that just limited to the coverflow styling? my 2d pages aren't translated into 3d magically? meh
Designers should be able to experiment with new interfaces, as long as there's no lag associated with it.
On my ancient laptop, Expose was annoying half the time. On a non-ancient graphics chipset, it's all hardware accelerated, so there's no lag. It's faster to use Expose to manage your windows than the old methods.
Granted, Expose is trivial compared to the latest GUI bling. But it's still worth remembering.
If it slows down the computer, it slows down the user. Since the point of an interface is to allow the user to communicate efficiently and easily with the computer, a slow flashy interface is worthless.
If anyone has an invite... I'd like one!
Let's apply the recipe for detecting shitty software without evaluating the code:
1. Only runs under Windows (check)
2. Extremely poor performance or stellar system requirements compared to similar products (check)
3. Bloated with useless features and eye candy which don't actually improve the user experience (check)
4. Requires vbrun.dll (nope)
3 out of 4 aint bad?
Are you serious? My home workstation is a dual core AMD with 2 gigs sporting a 8800 with 640M, and I view that machine to be an out dated POS. It replaced a single core AMD with 2 gigs and a nvidia card with 258M over a year ago that was more then two years old. Maybe I'm spoiled by my Quad E5405 with 4 gigs and SAS raid at work (and it's not the best workstation here), but damn... upgrade your computers people or don't be shocked when fresh apps don't work with your dinosaur.
...when I use a web browser I generally want to look at the web, not the browser.
I really suspect that they could get the same benefits without the fancy 3d user interface and swoosh effects. To really benefit from 3d you need a metaphor that uses 3d usefully. Just putting 3d flash on an operation doesn't buy you anything over using a 3d metaphor in two dimensions (the window/desktop metaphor).
The physical world is one possible approach: virtual reality "desktops" are popular in science fiction, and have been since the early '80s. I don't think there's anything I could fit in a slashdot comment that hasn't been said a thousand times over.
The one I'd like to see used is *interest*. When you work on something, you move close to it. When you don't, it drifts away, eventually fossilizing on the virtual ground or at the edge of the screen in some kind of iconic representation of the window/program/. You don't explicitly navigate in 3d, but when you select something you zoom in to it, so you don't need a 3d mouse. You can cycle through objects, or reorganize them and drag them around if you want to, but it shouldn't need to in normal use.
There are probably other useful attributes that could be modeled in the third dimension. Apple uses "time" in Time Machine, but they mostly use it as flash... they could (for example) let you see the history of the object you're working on as you're working on it. Another possibility would be to take something like virtual desktops and arrange them in three dimensions, so that other desktops are visible, faded and fogged and possibly defocussed, behind the one you're working on.
But just using the third dimension as flash, that isn't really all that interesting. It's pretty, but what does it do for you?
Hey, 2G of Ram? 256MB of video? What are we talking about? A game? A program that'll give me thousands of dollars?
*NO!*
It's just a web browser with 3D Bookmark and great graphics for the history! Ah-ha! Now I'll see my history with graphics! It's much easier! But wait... I never saw my history, I always make my Firefox clean it after I finish browsing! Uh... and 3D bookmark? Why the hell would I want this?
Forget it, let's keep the good Firefox with tabs and we're all happy!
I grew up on AOL dial-up Internet, and for some time was forced to use the AOL Browser... I hated it! When I finally switched to high-speed Internet and could use an actual browser (Firefox), I couldn't believe I spent almost 10 years using AOL's poorly designed Internet "browser"!
This better be better than counterstrike since it uses a lot more resources then the game. If you can have lan parties with it, I will decide I might try to run it in wine. ;-)
This browser seems as crappy as vista...
that big businesses create their own markets. They want to sell more high-end network (Internet) products and services. By creating this monster with an impish name, they will help drive a need for more speed, and more AT&T. And maybe that's OK. I just hate all of the websites that are useless on older, slower systems. I really respect the few who give high and lo bandwidth options. I wish it was a law (that all websites had to offer modem friendly versions of their sites.) Sigh. More more more.
... I can *feel* the MS IE team reading the specs and going "oooh, a challenge"
What a depressingly stupid machine.
What about the Acid3 Test?
| Status: MacGeek Pro | Religion: iGnosticism | Zodiac: Apple
to the NSA was the original slogan :-P
http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/att/att_splash.png
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