Netscape Founder Says Browser Innovation is Dead
Marc Andreessen says that web browsing innovation is dead. Of course when I was reading the article, I used Type-Ahead-Find to see if he mentioned Mozilla (he didn't). My Block Images from this server setting prevented ads from blinding me. Oh, and it was one of 13 tabs I had open at the time.
But at least he predicted Netscape would die soon. That's news.
Comments
Well it's nice to see ppl have an opinion without using the new things. I guess marc still uses communicator 4.72 to see if pages render incorrect.
Blocking popups is not an innovation. Sure, it's a nice feature, but it's not enhancing the navigation, it's just stopping an annoyance. In fact, I think you could make more of an argument to say that popups themselves were an innovation, although not a good one.
Tabs are closer to being innovative, if one uses them to enable a different style of navigation, but it's not really a new concept - you can (and people have) done the same navigational things with multiple windows which have been around forever (opening lots of pages at once and flipping between them) - tabs just makes the same thing a bit more efficient (particularly in Mozilla which takes a long time to open a new window).
Seamonkey's browser, Firebird, and IE6, all look and feel basically the same as Netscape 3 did. If you took a Firebird user that had never used anything else and gave them Netscape 3, they'd be able to use it no problem.
I beg to differ.
Tell me Netscape 3 had type-ahead-find. Or keyword searching. Or searchable bookmarks. Or extensibility/extreme customizability. Or popup blocking (which is definitely an innovation whether you think so or not). Or middle-clicking on links to load a tab in the background.
If Netscape 3 has all these features, I'd bow down. But it doesn't. And others will most likely chime in with those features that they as well can't live without.
The funny thing is that hopefully we would all be able to use Netcape 3. Give me a location bar and an Internet connection and I can (crazy enough) surf the web. I would however, catch myself having phantom pains. Missing those features which have made my web experience that much better since finding Mozilla Firebird.
Marc must have been following the Spyglass browser, which got used in Internet Explorer, which hasn't done much to innovate the browser scene in the last few years.
He must have blocked out his whole Netscape experience...
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