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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.'"
Except this is based on Gecko (Mozilla).
Then again, that might explain the bloat
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
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.
Typical home systems have 4 gigs of RAM? Last I checked, most systems were coming with 1-2 gigs of RAM, and the majority of systems people have are running between 512megs and 1gig.
Depends on how much memory mapped IO you have. Without or with a low memory graphics card, no soundcard, usb and firewire disabled, and so on maybe.
Read a little bit harder. The OP said "That's[2GB] up to half the RAM on the typical home system." "up to half" means that 2GB would be at most 50% of the RAM on the typical home system. Which would mean that the typical home system has a minimum of 4GB. It could be less than 50%, say 10% in which case the typical home system would have 20GB of RAM. Obviously this is wrong.
I corrected the OP to say "That's at least half the RAM on the typical home system. "at least half" means that 2GB is never less than half the RAM on the typical home system. Which means the maximum amount of RAM a typical home system can have is 4GB. That's about what most typical PC motherboards accept, and all that can be addressed by a 32 bit OS.
You are right though, 2GB is an insane amount to require for a web browser.
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