It's all Netscape's fault that Microsoft isn't innovating anymore!

Or something.

That's what I got from that part of Cooper's article.

--Kynn

stick it to 'em, Dave! :)

agreed...

I'm not impressed by Charles's article -- he's clearly an ignorant wanker, but, Dave, how much of that stuff in your penultimate paragraph really qualifies as "innovative?" Popup blocking? SnapBack? Please -- both are hacks to fix problems that shouldn't occur in the first place. Web navigation in tabs, maybe.

What about alternative navigation paradigms? What about a tree of thumbnail images representing the pages you've visited on the current site (perhaps as a sidebar)?

Maybe it's an issue of semantics. I equate "innovative" to "revolutionary," not "evolutionary." Tabs may qualify. Popup blocking doesn't, in my book.

My main point is simply that we are inventing new features, and that we aren't stuck in 1999 like Cooper suggests.

Pop up blocking has made browsing possible again. (A slight exageration, but you get the point). What good are all the features in the world if you lose control of your browser to others. Integrating pop-up blocking as well as easy Font resizing are two features that make safari shine. Revolutionary programming, probably not, revolutionary implementation, yes.

Off topic, but any idea why this is crashing Safari?

http://development.incutio.com/lums/new/page.html

Early attempt to creat a table-less design for an educational site. Works OK in Camino and Moz on OSX, and IE6/Moz/Opera on Windows. But something wrong with the stylesheet gives Safari the spinning beachball of death (on my machine at least). I'm baffled by it.

Yep -- the whole reason why Internet Explorer hasn't advanced or offered any real, new, useful features in quite a long time is because of Netscape. As if being beaten blue and effectively kicked off 95% of the world's computers wasn't harsh enough, now they are being blamed for Microsoft's technological stagnation. Dave - seriously - the day you guys give that big blue E the boot from the dock the better for us all.

Obviously innovation is going to slow down as an application matures, particularly one that has a core function of displaying information (rather than creating it). If you want something revolutionary, create a new client-server protocol. As far as I'm concerned, innovation in web browsers should be primarily focused on improving standards support and performance. That's not to say i don't love snapback and Safari bookmarks.

The point is that Microsoft don't innovate unless there is competition, and there isn't any. Your points are really minor improvements, that don't make any difference to the average user.

What is needed is must-have new technology that will get people to upgrade to new browsers and servers. Netscape 2, 3, 4 had must-have features. Internet Explorer 5 or 6 had must-have stability. There have been no interesting improvements since IE5.

*cough* tabbed browsing *cough*

I actually believe that for the first time in quite a few years, a significant amount of people are switching away from MSIE.

AWStats is quite an excellent and free log analysis tool. When I briefly checked their demo statistics, I noticed something peculiar. Something I had also seen in my own logs, but partially dismissed because they were my own logs.

For this site, From January 2003 to March 2003, MSIEs market share has fallen from 97.5% to 79.5%.

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl

Why? Because MSIE is basically a product that hasn't changed significantly for several years. All it ever really had going for it was the fact that it was the _default_ browser on the most common operating system.

He didn't (as I read it) complain about other browsers not being innovative, just not a challenge to Microsoft.

Seriously, how many of those "innovations" in the penultimate paragraph have been any challenge to Microsoft's dominance?

My first time posting a comment to *any* blog...

Dave, I agree with you. Cooper is off-base in saying that innovation has halted. Whether it's faster rendering, more rigorous standard implementation, or tabs -- that's all innovation in a sense.

With the exception of tabs, however, it seems that the web experience for 90% of users is the same it was in '99. Things may have gotten faster, popups blocked, and breadcrumbs dropped -- but is it of the same magnitude as say...ah gee...i dunno...some feature that defines webbrowsing in and of itself? Maybe bookmarks are a good example..

I think what Cooper is trying to say (yet definitely does not end up saying) is that browsers are more-or-less being refined. What a browser should have and fundamentally be was defined "way back when." (Again, the exception of tabs)

I really disagree with your assertion that even if Netscape 4 was superior to IE4 that still wouldn't have stopped Microsoft from dominating the web browsing market. Personally I know of too many people that stopped using Netscape and switched to IE after Netscape 4 came out because it was such a piece of $#@*. Sure, IE would still have garnered a very large marketshare of the market if even if Netscape 4 didn't suck so much, but certainly the quality of Netscape 4 forced many people to switch to another browser.

The focus is here, understandibly, is the Mac where it can be argued Microsoft has little interest. IE on the Mac is the worst of all the browsers and I switched as soon as a viable alternative (Mozilla) was available.

I must say I disagree.
Surely, the guy has no clue of what he is speaking: he has definitly not tried any browser apart from IE and Netscape. But there's more than that, imho, much more.
He mentioned we are stuck at 1999's browsers... personally I think he confused two concepts (and so have many of us, imho): the browser and the web.

If we go back to Mosaic, can we really say there has been much innovation? I still have my bookmarks and I still click to move in a page. What's the big deal? Neither IE nor Netscape have evolved much from that, but then why should they? The browser is only an intermediate between the user and the web and this is what the web is. It would be like saying that books have not evolved much since the centuries ago because we still have pages which we read sequentially!
In fact there is probably much more evolution in Camino or Mozilla with respect to 1999 IE, than IE with respect to the very first browsers.

Instead what he is confusing for a browser is the Web experience. That did change A LOT. What really changed from the times of Mosaic is what you can display in a webpage: there's much more colour, better control over layout, frames, Javascript, Flash, and the list goes on and on!!! Look no further than the evolution of the HTML to see what I mean.
THIS is what really changed, and it is true (I think, though I am not expert, Dave?) that things have not changed much since the 1999. But that's only because we got everything we could possibly want!

So what I am trying to say? The web is the one that evolved and got revolutionised a few times. But now revolution is taking a break until the day people will feel this web doesn't satisfy their needs and they want even more.
The browser in the meantime will always move slowly, adding one by one little small improvements that alone are no big difference but that all put together improve immensily the experience.

What do people think?

Bravo! Great article review. Agree with you 100%. I've searched and switched browsers for years looking for browser Utopia. It looks like its getting closer. As far as getting the "big E" off the dock, I did within two weeks of downloading Safari in early Jan. I Still keep Camino and Omniweb there for backups but using less and less.

Richard, that page doesn't hang Safari for me.

Then again, I'm (hypothetically) using v64, so maybe there's been a change that fixes that (just like v64 doesn't crash on devedge.netscape.com)

What I want to know is why doesn't MS fix their busted ass PNG support? Also, why can't they figure out multi-part JPEG's? Gesh....MS really sucks.

I would not give a care if I didn't have to support MS users....

>Then again, I'm (hypothetically) using v64, so maybe
>there's been a change that fixes that (just like v64 doesn't
>crash on devedge.netscape.com)

Interesting hypothesis you have there. :-) Does anybody have any idea that they want to talk about concerning what in the world it was about devedge that causes such problems?

IE is not losing market share. The top 3 are:
IE6: 53%
IE5: 38%
NS4: 1%

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2002/July/browser.php

For a general perspective, the top 6 OS are:
W98: 44%
W2K: 28%
WME: 16%
WNT: 3%
W95: 2%
Mac: 2%

Sure, there are improvements to browsing, but my browsing experience is mostly the same as it was in my early days. New technologies have expanded the web's potential, but I still look at forward and back buttons and rely on the standard search engine to find information. There has been innovation, but not the "Think Different" ideas that I had hoped when Apple unveiled Safari. It is just a new default browser for me.

Where to begin...

It did matter that Netscape 4 blew. It really did. I tried to purchase Netscape 3, repeatedly, and was told to just download it off the web by various Netscape employees for free. Bubble children with no business plan.

IE 4 was a better product, and the "superior" alternative browsers that have come out since then aren't anywhere in the grey matter of 99% of Internet users. They haven't been given a reason to change browsers. I guess all of the "browser space" experts can look out over the masses with smug certainty, knowing that they know what matters in space. Outer space. Browser space. Any space.

There's a bit of the slashdot mindset here where it's convenient to blame Microsoft for the failures of Netscape. But it isn't rational. And as others have mentioned there hasn't been that much innovation in the space we call browser since 1999.

THE problem is that you aren't producing browsers that people what to use, or even know about, in this space we call earth.

"What about alternative navigation paradigms? What about a tree of thumbnail images representing the pages you've visited on the current site (perhaps as a sidebar)?"

What a horrible idea. What is with people and this thumbnail sidebar obsession. You aren't going to be able to identify pages easily by their thumbnail and sidebars waste all kinds of space, so stop suggesting it.

minnieman, Netscape did fail miserably to produce a competitive product following Netscape 4, and I don't blame Microsoft for that.

However, I also don't believe continued superior products from Netscape would have made any difference whatsoever in the outcome of the browser war. Most people just use what comes with their system, and they don't go out of their way to find and download alternative versions of software.

Even AOL's success can largely be attributed to the fact that it was bundled with Windows and had a signup link on the desktop.

I believe Phoenix on Win32 is vastly superior to Internet Explorer, but how do you teach people that such a browser exists? Without a means of distribution, it will never reach a wide audience. It's sad but true.

bravo!

You want to convince people to switch from IE?

They won't do so for one stupid little feature or other. They'll switch because web sites they want to view don't render properly in IE.

To be bloody-minded about it, what we need are more 100% standards-compliant web sites which only sorta, but don't quite work in IE.

I'm doing my bit with my blog (XHTML 1.1 + MathML 2.0 + CSS2), delivered as application/xhtml+xml to those browsers (Mozilla, Phoenix, ...) which can deal with all the cutting-edge stuff.

Safari has a way to go with the CSS2 on my site. But I'm sure that, by 1.0, it'll do that much flawlessly (I don't, however, have illusions about MathML support.).

thecounter.com's statistics should in no way bw treated as "reliable". According to those stats WinXP users are outweighed by Win 3.11 users by a factor of 13.

I think you are being overly harsh. This article is extremely critical of MS. It is not targeted at the power or sophisticated user. It simply points out, considering the vast bulk of users use IE. that that technology of web browsing has stagnated precisely BECAUSE MS is a monopoly. Whether alternate better technologies exist is irrelevant BECAUSE of this fact. This author is helping to make a point we all want made.

Why be so critical? The point is, MS's monopoly status makes better technology unavailable.

-R

What if Dave Hyatt died in a freak accident?

Apple would clone his ass to continue work on Safari. Yes, he is just that valuable to them that they would go through all that trouble (and spend the cash).

Note to Dave: Keep up working on Safari and blogging like this and you can negotiate a whole different kind of salary. You da man! ;-)

OmniWeb's "in-cache editing" has yet to be mentioned as an innovation.
It's saved my butt more than once -- let me finish an e-commerce transaction. We need that in Safari.

What I *really* want to see, innovation wise, is [AppleScript] attachable events where I could, say, insert code as a head patch on the parser so I could filter out banner ads, fix table widths or font specs, etc.
And to be able to run scripts (compiled script documents) from the toolbar (as well as from a Script menu in the menubar).

Oh, and a DOM with full AppleScript accessibility (no ugly JavaScript in the way).
That would be innovative, for sure. And for that AS DOM parsing to be intuitive to scripters.

I had a pretty wild idea a while back, for that Q.BATi project (was similar to Chim.. er, Camino).
You can find my mockup here, if you're curious what I drew...
http://www.natural-innovations.com/aqua/

-boo

There were browser prototypes with all manner of alternative navigation paradigms back in the early days of the Web, done as corporate research projects or academic exercises. Graphical tree displays representing the space of links were especially frequently reinvented, some of them very flashy (some used 3D cyberspaces or warping hyperbolic planes). None of them turned out to be particularly pleasant to use on a regular basis.

The standard Web browser interface has its problems as a universal interface to every kind of application, which is what it has to be today; but at least it's easy for a novice user to get the basics and surf around. Like the basic GUI design found in every modern desktop operating system (which seems to generate dozens of papers a year about how obsolete it is, yet never seems to die), it is not perfect, but it succeeded for a reason. It makes sense to work from that, but make it as elegant as possible and give it feature refinements like tabs.

About browser stats: They vary a lot, and can be distorted in various ways, most obviously by the self-selection of users who come to the sites where the counting is being done. Many of those stats sites also have messed-up counters that are wildly out of date, still assume that it's a bilateral IE/Netscape world, and don't see through even elementary identity spoofing (they often identify Gecko-based browsers as "Netscape 5" and many other non-Microsoft products as IE, and can even mistake robots for real browsers). Some even count hits rather than pageviews, an approach that has obvious problems.

That said, no matter who you trust, it's clear that IE's market share is pretty overwhelming, and probably not shrinking much on Windows. But interesting things are happening in some niche markets.

For instance, CodeBitch of MacEdition (who is a leading expert on tuning browser sniffers for maximum intelligence) has periodically written about the Mac OS X browser scene, which is radically different from the world at large.

http://www.macedition.com/cb/index.shtml

Bear in mind that her numbers are skewed by MacEdition's audience, much of which consists of people who go there to read her articles about the Web, so they're probably going to be more avant-garde in their browser selection than the general Mac-using public.

Still, it's clear that Internet Explorer is being murdered on Mac OS X. For a while its main competitor was OmniWeb, then it was Mozilla and/or Netscape 6/7, then Chimera; but when Safari came out, it seized an enormous chunk of market share instantly (much of which came from the other also-ran browsers). These two articles from January are fascinating to compare and contrast:

http://www.macedition.com/cb/cb_20030106.php
http://www.macedition.com/cb/cb_20030127.php

Great article Dave couldn't agree with you more and it wasn't Micro$oft that did the innovation on the web in days past... it was indeed Netscape who invented all these great things that people still use to display their information on the www. (frames, tables, layers etc.)

M$ woke up and bundled their 'fantastic' IE 1.0 with the plus pack of Windows 95 (with internet explorer startup screen). It took M$ with all it's money and programming expertise about 4 years to catch up with NS and i consider IE 5.0 still as the best browser M$ made, PC version aswell as the Mac version. The bundling of the browser with the OS was the virtual nail in the coffin for Netscape.

Let's not forget that pretty much every release on the Mac sucked all sorts of ass, this ended with the 5.0 release for Mac OS 9, the OSX version is prolly the slowest browser ever seen on OSX and has a shitload of bugs (CSS and DHTML related) that can't seem to be fixed (buglist on request).

IMHO the best browser ever, before all the DHTML stuff got all hot and so... is Netscape 3.0 both for the PC and the Mac.

Safari will be the most used browser on OSX second will be (wishfull thinking maybe?) Camino, i'm looking forward to 0.8 to see how it competes with Safari, as far as i'm concerned IE on the Mac may die horribly. BTW that guy really doesn't know what he was writing about.

It's funny... Netscape 3 on the Mac was terribly unstable for me. But that was back in the days before Open Transport, so the emulated 68k TCP/IP stack was probably a major contributor to the instability. Anyway, I had better luck with the early IE/Mac versions, even with all the bugs they had. But most people seemed to have the opposite experience.

It's hard to remember now how amazing a development IE5.0 for the Classic Mac OS was back in 2000. For a little while it was easily the best Web browser in the world-- a slick, finished product with a clever user interface and *good* CSS/HTML layout support, second only to Gecko's (and Mozilla/Mac wasn't really in a usable state at the time).

IE5/Mac even (controversially) anticipated some features of the Mac OS X Aqua interface. It's too bad that the OS X version was such a bad port.

My opinion of NS 4 was that is blew. I remember when IE5 for that Mac came out... I made the switch to IE instantaneously. I'm not a big fan of any MS product either, but it was point blank a better product. So, from my point of view, if NS actualy had a superior product then I'd still be using it. Now I use a combination of Safari, Camino and the very, very occasional IE. I'd be using Safari all the time if there were a few of the bugs fixed, but I have faith in Dave to take care of them :) - esspecialy if in the final version we still have a way to change the 'agent' of the browser. But, this is all irrelevant because I'm on a Mac and anything I do is not really representative of the whole on the Internet. If everyone used the better product, no one would be using Windows in the first place.

[Qoute]
IE is not losing market share.
The top 3 are:
IE6: 53%
IE5: 38%
NS4: 1%

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2002/July/browser.php

[/Quote]
...........................

Wow. Dude. Your one) quoting stats from the Counter.com, two) quoting stats from the Counter from July 2002. Its 2003, a whole new world in terms computer and browser lifecycles.

avenues of distribution....

When Netscape first came out, versions 1 thru 3, it was clearly the best browser by a huge margin. Huge. And at that time, Microsoft probably dominated the desktop by a 90%+ margin. The avenue of distribution was the web. I had my own favorite ftp server to download the latest version the second it came out: ftp13.netscape.com.

When IE 4 came out, I continued to use Netscape 3 because Netscape 4 was "not so good" and because I like using software from other companies besides MS. I spent a long time in that mode until I finally gave up waiting for Netscape to produce a useful product and I just started using IE because it was the best browser on the Windows platform, and probably still is for most people.

Netscape offered NO reasonable alterative to IE5 or IE6 until very recently. I guess MS should have been required to include an inferior product in their OS because it would make the world a better place. I think if Netscape had continued to produce a much higher quality product at least they would have stayed in the running a lot longer. I would have gladly bought 5000+ browsers for our organization. That was an opportunity that was taken away from me by Netscape, not MS.

Anyway, now I use Mozilla 1.3 and Phoenix on Windows and Linux. Safari, Camino, and IE on OS X. I'm not a typical user. If as many expect Safari becomes the default browser for OS X, and others complain you have an advantage because of your avenue of distribution, what will your response be? Will it be that you've developed the best browser for the platform, or that you're just coasting along because you're the default browser. I'm guessing you'll defend your postion on merit, as you should because Safari rocks.

Microsoft would have done the same thing while Netscape was imploding...and they would have been right to do so.

Enough. Come'on get .64 out. I need my tabbed browsing!

Thanks for Safari.

Check this out:

"Battle of the Browsers"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,914466,00.html

This guy Jack Schofield puts this smug "history is written by the victors" thing into a larger - and even smugger - context.

For an intelligent discussion of the theme that Schofield glosses, see W. Brian Arthur's "Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy".

Chris: To change the 'agent' string you need to enable the Debug menu.
Go into Terminal and enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.safari "IncludeDebugMenu" 'YES'

You'll need to quit and relaunch Safari for this.

...

Re: TheCounter.com: I, too, would never trust such statistics. It's fun to satisfy curiosity, but that is all those stats are good for. They only count graphical browsers anyway, and even then only those with image loading enabled. Thus it is flawed from the outset. I do most of my surfing in Lynx, so TheCounter never even sees me. But I do exist! I'm typing this in Lynx right now.

-Walter

The only real browser innovation I'm itching for is the ability to link to specific bits of text on a web page rather than just to the entire page itself.

>>There have been no interesting improvements since IE5.

*cough* tabbed browsing *cough*<<

Yeah. And link prefetching. Who does link prefetching?

Brad the Ignorant

Scott: Do you mean like a kind of automatic Find command? If so, regexps would really rock. :-)
something like http://foo.com/bar.html#$grep$/D(ave)?+Hyatt/ ?

Brad: As a Web author, I do not like link prefetchers or site suckers. They interfere with the identification of what pages people actually choose to look at -- extremely vital information.

-Walter

David Hyatts entire motus operandi is that of a whining little loser.

Please, people, let's not forget that.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why is tabbed browsing terrifically interesting? Sure, it's a handy little feature, but it's mostly just a new and, for some, more convenient UI metaphor for managing multiple windows. It's not doing anything revolutionary for how the information itself is displayed/managed. What is it that elevates it above the significance of, say, SnapBack or autofill passwords?

The headline "What if Netscape Won" was probably more for shock value than reality or even a summary of the article. Perhaps a better ehadline would be "What if the browser game was still in the 4th inning?"

The distribution problem is obviously huge but not insurmountable. Last I checked AOL's 35 million users still got IE. Linux/Unix is nearly 100% Moz. There's a 3 horse race on Mac. Why was IE the first (only?) rendering component to be embeddable? How could Netscape/Moz have missed that?

Once Netscape/Mozilla decided to build a suite rather than a browser, there was basically no chance for it to produce a competitive browser. The decision to lose focus on the browser was absolutely catastrophic and we all suffer greatly now. Let's hope the good reception of Phoenix and Camino shows Mozilla what it should be concentrating on.

Gecko is embeddable, moz isn't

I used to believe that line about how bad it was that Mozilla tried to create a whole platform instead of just a browser. It was bad for AOL/Netscape, but was it bad for everyone? From the deal we got a collection of parts that have sparked a revival in new browser development. Since these parts are open-source, they're not going to disappear if some company goes under (though development might slow somewhat). Market share of the resulting browsers will probably always be low, but the people who want to use them can.

People spoke of Mozilla as a failed project for years, but it seems to me that all sorts of parties have benefited from it greatly just in the past year or two. It isn't just Gecko, either. Even Safari uses some pieces of Mozilla, something that is often forgotten.

Dave, you realize that the exact same sort of hegemony that you pin on Microsoft (bundling their browser with their OS, and the subsequent overtaking of Netscape) is going to happen with Mac OS/Safari as soon as Safari goes 1.0? There is no doubt in my mind that as soon as Safari has a final release, it's going right into the dock, and it will be out with IE, and Safari will start to dominate (er...complete its domination) of the Mac browser market.

(This is all under the assumption that Apple is not bound by some sort of contract to keep IE in the dock for a certain period of time; actually, it probably is under such a contract. In which case, Apple will find some other clever way to push Safari.)

Walter: Yup. That's exactly what I mean. I would *love* to be able to link to specific bits of text on a web page rather than just the entire static page. Just think about how that would revolutionize online citation....

Cheers!
Scott

"It was bad for AOL/Netscape, but was it bad for everyone?"

Yes. It was catastrophic. It is the singular reason why there is no possibility for Mozilla to compete. Mozilla has only become interesting recently now that ther is finally some focus on the browser (i.e., Phoenix and Camino).