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January 13, 2005 History of Browsing Web Content
Recently I’ve become interested in the user interface models that have been applied to browsing the Internet. The models that are use by popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, browsers from the Mozilla Foundation, Safari) are, for the most part, identical. But they don’t need to be. How did we get to where we are today?
1990 Tim Berners-Lee creates WorldWideWeb, later renamed Nexus, and introduces a back/next metaphor to navigate through a list of links.
1993 Marc Andreessen creates Mosaic at the University of Illinois which became the first cross-platform browser. Marc introduced the back/forward metaphor to help with navigation of hyperlinks.
1994 Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen create Mosaic Communications, later renamed Netscape, based on the Mosaic product.
1994 Opera developed in Norway.
1995 The popularity of the product helps drive the Netscape IPO--the 3rd largest in Nasdaq history--which creates a $2.6B company.
1995 Microsoft launches Windows 95 and Internet Explorer.
1995 Real Networks, founded by former Microsoft employee Rob Glaser, launches their first player and drives the market for passive content.
1996 Pointcast launched with 1.5M users by the end of the year and a total of $5M in revenue; the company was valued at $240M. Unlike Andreessen's browser, Pointcast used "push" technology that delivered channels of content to the customer's computer without him or her having to navigate, or pull, content from the web.
1997 Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. offers $450M for Pointcast, but the deal fell apart in what has been seen as one of the biggest blunders of the dot com era.
1998 AOL buys Netscape in $4.2B merger.
1998 Microsoft dumps all of its Real Networks stock and competes directly in the streaming media market.
1999 Entrypoint buys Pointcast for $20M.
1999 Internet Explorer surpassed Netscape in market share.
2003 AOL sets up the Mozilla Foundation with a $2M pledge.
2003 iTunes Music Store launched, serving as an example of a successful embedded browsing experience.
2004 Firefox 1.0 launched.
I read an article in Wired last year called Conversation With Marc Andreessen (Feb 2003) in which Wired asked Marc what he would do if he could go back and design the browser over again. Interestingly the one thing he said he would change was the metaphor that he popularized--back/forward. Here is an exceprt:
Wired News - "Ten years have passed since then. Has the browser evolved much in that period?"
Andreessen - "We always figured there'd be a much more sophisticated way of navigating, but no one ever came up with it. Things like the Back and forward button, we never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface. But people get locked into metaphors. You have to be careful with the metaphors you put in front of people because once they click onto one, that's it."
Of the companies that have been working in this space over the last ten to fifteen years, Pointcast was perhaps the most successful at creating a new metaphor but they suffered from user interface problems of their own. When EntryPoint came out many thought that this second attempt would resolve the problems, but in fact things only got worse. EntryPoint gained entry in to the
Interface Hall of Shame:
"EntryPoint preserves the basic features that made PointCast popular... It also includes many new interface problems, reduces usability and 'quietly' eliminated many options and features with no comment... It seems clear little consideration of what PointCast did well or innovatively was carried over by the new design team."
Recently Microsoft has been talking about "smart clients" or "web connected applications" as the hot ticket for the next ten years, which is understandable with their investment in XAML, Indigo and Avalon. The Konfabulator knock-off that Apple is introducing in Tiger seems to serve as a testament to this.
But as Marc Andreessen says "There was a huge amount of browser development from 1993 to 1998, then nothing much happened from 1998 to 2002. Now, there's a huge number of people doing all kinds of things and you've got real innovation going on." Things are just getting started.
Posted by johnnie at January 13, 2005 09:35 PM
Comments
Unlike Andreessen's browser, Pointcast used "push" technology that delivered channels of content to the customer's computer without him or her having to navigate, or pull, content from the web.
Posted by: tramadol at March 17, 2007 11:08 AM
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