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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.
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!
maybe they are trying to cache the internet?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
And people complain about firefox being bloated? You should not need a dedicated graphics card to check your email.
It's not just made for Vista. It's modeled after Vista too.
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.
Unless things have changed drastically since the last time I looked, that's all the ram of a typical home system or 2-4x if you could those that were bought years ago.
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.
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
So will your significant other.
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.
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
..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.
Wow, for me, that's just one of the "whys!" With Microsoft's relative dominance of the browser market and Firefox's slow but steady gains, I don't really understand what sort of a market AT&T thinks they're breaking into. Firefox is gaining because of its simplicity and flexibility, not bloat. Then again, I don't think the Slashdot crowd is the target demographic for this product.
If AT&T can start bundling this browser with its telecommunications suites, I suppose it could gain some traction there... but I'm still not seeing it. Are they going to eventually integrate it with some hardware to allow for browsing with your TV? Can somebody with a bit more insight into AT&T's brain illuminate this?
The moon may be smaller than the earth, but it's much farther away!
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.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I need more RAM.
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
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.
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.
it's variable. it's 4GB total minus some other stuff, most prominently video ram, so if you have a 512MB videocard, you'll be able to use about 3.5GB.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
Lex turns to the clueless paleontologists, "This is Pogo! I know this!"
[
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.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
There's no taste for accounting.
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.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
--
make install -not war
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?