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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.'"
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!
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
All NSA jokes aside, my fear(as somebody who just signed a contract with ATT wireless internet/HSDPA) is that they'll try to force crap like this onto my computer. Using their mandatory, proprietary connection manager is bad enough(takes 10 minutes to install on reasonably fast, modern computer and the install sounded like a hard drive defrag!).
So vista takes up a GB of ram on boot, and the AT+T browser takes another 2?
If I'm not mistaken vista still can only "use" 3GB of it's ram.
Does anyone else see a problem?
I fear the Y2038 bug
You'd be right if not for the fact that most computers don't come with the video card that this requires. RAM, CPU, sure. But the video card that's still in most computers these days can run WoW at best. If this browser needs something with 256Mb of RAM in the video card, then this is intended for, well, nobody.
I like basketball!!1!
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.
Bell Labs is gone. I'm glad you brought up its accomplishments, because AT&T Labs developing a bloated browser when we've got several and don't need more divergence from the standards compares very poorly with the old Bell Labs. This new lab doesn't get credit for the old one. To the contrary, getting rid of the old one shows what AT&T is not interested in: science in the public interest.
I'm going to leave out how your admission that you have no gripes with AT&T's treatment of privacy reflects on your judgement. But it's relevant to privacy, and to AT&T's proper mission.
AT&T is busy researching how to snoop all over the Internet, on the pretext of "copyright police". It's already censored for its corporate political agenda some early TV broadcasts it's carried on its network, while it works on a fully declared agenda to hold routes over its backboes hostage from different content providers (and, we should now expect, depending on the political content). And of course AT&T is guilty of violating the Constitution repeatedly for years by spying on us without a warrant (not even the trivially dispensed FISA warrants), as revealed in specific operations the company has tried to suppress. It's even trying to get retroactive amnesty for its many crimes in this area.
AT&T has to clean up its act on its basic service provision. Even apart from its untrustworthiness not to spy on us, its markets still don't have anywhere near the broadband connectivity, speed or pricing that its many foreign competitors provide, even to people with a lot less money to spend on it. AT&T is trying to get into TV broadcasting over its network, by forcing down the few remaining constraints the people have in ensuring that vastly powerful weapon is not used to further abuse the public in the media market.
That fat browser is the kind of bundling that locks people into services and out of choices. It's designed to be a SW "set top box" so AT&T can compete with cablecos in TV as well as phone and Internet. All of which services AT&T is doing an inadequate job providing now, even before it spreads its quality thinner by expanding its reach.
You might be happy with AT&T, because you're paying attention only to your mobile bill (but not comparing it to, say, European bills for the same service). And because you're giving it credit for the extinct Bell Labs that had little or nothing to do with today's AT&T Labs. And also because you're turning a blind eye to how AT&T is spying on you and everyone else.
But that doesn't mean I have to trade all that in exchange for a fat browser that runs only on an upgraded Windows machine.
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make install -not war