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.'"

Comments

Bloat

[MozeeToby]

And people complain about firefox being bloated? You should not need a dedicated graphics card to check your email.

Eye candy and Apple's success

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:Linux

[Bodrius]

Usability (through better visualization)?

History and bookmark handling are not scaling well to modern use of the web.

They were designed for a much smaller Internet - back when Yahoo was a comprehensive catalogue of the web, and you could honestly bookmark a short list of all your favorite sites.

Anyone who had to go through the browser history after a long week, to find 'that link that had some information but I cannot find in google again', has experienced this first hand.
All the links look the same, all your searches get in the way, etc.

Anyone who has had a few dozen disposable bookmarks by trying to avoid the history search also has experienced this first hand.

Bookmarks lose their value as they accumulate, and reality is that you often cannot know the crucial link will be crucial until after the fact - after you got another piece of data. Specially for technical documentation.

Pogo seems to be addressing two major usability problems that exist today.
At this point, I mostly consider those to be non-existent browser features by now. Repeating an Internet search is typically more time-efficient.

Now, I don't really think painting it all in 3D really helps - but what they seem to be trying to fix are real problems.

Re:2GB of RAM???

[Jarjarthejedi]

At least 2GB of RAM for a typical home computer? I want some of what you're smoking. Wow...I must live in the wrong area with my 1GB primary computer, which I use to play games on. Guess I should be upgrading so I can run this web browser...

I mean seriously. 1GB is still a perfectly reasonable amount of ram. I can run 80% of modern games (GAMES! We're talking Call of Duty 4 without lag here) and my system isn't up to spec for this WEB BROWSER! And the default response is, of course, 2GB isn't that much. I mean, no one has less than 3 right now right?

Sometimes even those of us who love technology and play computer games can't afford an upgrade (and before you talk about how cheap ram is, my laptop won't take standard ram, and has 2 512 cards right now. It would be ~$60 to upgrade to 2 gigs, and I'd have to either have a tech out or send it in. Yay Laptops) No Web Browser should require more RAM than Call of Duty 4. Ever.