Browsersphere

With at least a couple more Firefox 3 betas on the way, the release of IE8 Beta 1 and the official release of the Acid3 test, there’s a lot going on in the browsersphere these days.  Let’s jump right into it…

• First off, it’s now March, so Netscape Navigator is officially dead (but do you really believe that?).
• The Opera Desktop Team has released what they are calling a Plugin Milestone Build.
• I think this guy may be more into web browsers than I am.
• Mozilla’s been getting some fan mail.
• Opera has made the switch back to Google for search in Opera Mini and Opera Mobile (see a screenshot of the new Opera Mini start page).  There’s more on this over at TechCrunch as well.
• Sebastiaan de With (remember him?) thinks that the Firefox 3 interface is going nowhere.
• A forum post pointed me toward another minor player called Acoo Browser, which is another browser built on Trident.
• CyberNet claims that Avant Browser 11 will be the best version of the browser yet.
• Ben Moore seems to have mixed feelings about some of the changes made between Maxthon v1 and v2.
• sKatterBrainZ claims that “there’s nothing in Safari that is truly innovative or unique to the world of web browsing.”
• Somewhat contradictory to that, Ian Hixie, the author of the Acid3 test, seems pretty impressed with how quickly the Safari/WebKit team has responded to the issues uncovered by Acid3 (I’ve covered this here as well).
• Ian Clifton had some interesting points to make about the Internet Explorer team’s original stance on standards support in the forthcoming IE8.
• microformatique points out that the IE team has used the hAtom microformat to implement their WebSlices feature.
• CyberNet says the SpaceTime 3D Browser is “mostly for fun” and shows off a video demo of the interesting browser.
• Firefox 3 Beta 3 has replaced Firefox 2 as the default browser in Alpha 6 of Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
• Opera Mini users browsed over 1.8 million web pages back in January.
• Kevin Yank says that table-based layouts will be “the next big thing” (via Simon Willison).
• Daniel Glazman wrote a CSS3 Selector test suite and posted the results for Firefox 3.0b4pre (Minefield), Safari 3.0.4 for Windows, Opera 9.23 and Internet Explorer 7.  He was impressed to see that the latest builds of Opera pass all of his tests.
• Opera Twitters (via Opera Watch).
• Myk Melez talks about what it’s like to sheriff for Mozilla.
• Opera Mini users can now zoom images.
• Mitchell Baker has posted about the Mozilla Steering Committee.
• Jesse Ruderman created a Greasemonkey script for those who spend a lot of time looking at the Firefox tinderbox.
• Opera’s Charles McCathieNevile, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson will square off at SXSW tomorrow in a panel called “Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again?”
• It doesn’t look like many CSS3 features have made their way into IE8 yet.
• Konqueror 4 for Windows has been reviewed.
• Someone decided to show off how they made a web browser with Visual Basic 2008 in under three minutes on YouTube.
• Okiwi is a free web browser for the Nintendo DS.
• An online poll asking what the greatest web browser ever is has some interesting options from which to choose.
• A C|Net podcast covers, among other things, BMWs that feature full-blown in-dash web browsers.
• Dan Gayle digs Lynx.
• Auto Web Browser “will consult the search engines from a user defined list, download the pages to your computer, filter and analyze them and then it will automatically surf further, downloading other potentially interesting pages using the links from the meaningful part of the relevant documents.”
• The Off By One Web Browser “may be the world’s smallest and fastest web browser with full HTML 3.2 support.”
• The WorldWideWeb browser (which was later renamed Nexus) turned 17 years old last month.
• You can view your Firefox web browser history visually with ThumbStrip.
• Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, Maxthon, Opera and Safari are nominated in the Browsing category of the Webware 100.
• Anne van Kesteren covers some of the “evil” things about IE8.

Amazingly enough, there’s a lot more to post about, but that should hold you over for a little bit.  I’m interested in hearing if Browsersphere visitors are more interested in somewhat random links like this or if it would be preferable to have the links broken down by the web browser to which they correspond.  If you have any thoughts on that, please leave a comment.

Tags: Acid3, Add-ons, Avant, Beta, CSS, Extensions, Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, Konqueror, Linux, Lynx, Maxthon, Microformats, Minor Players, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Opera Mini, Safari, Trident, Ubuntu, Video, Web Standards, YouTube

As promised, I sent some questions to Sebastiaan de With, the icon and interface designer who came up with the idea for a new web browser, Latitude, which was covered here at Browsersphere recently.

Sebastiaan was kind enough to come back with very thorough and informative answers, so I’ve posted them here in full, with a few minor edits and links added.

Has the idea for Latitude been lingering in your mind for a long time, or is it something that sprang to life only recently?

I’ve been thinking about browser interfaces since the last few months, mostly inspired by the expressions of Mac users about the lack of a Mac-experience in browsers like Firefox and Flock. Although most people consider an .app bundle adequately ‘Mac-like’, I think it goes down to the very mental model the user has of the software he’s using. Take, for example, Safari’s bookmark management. There’s this great bookmark bar, that lets you toggle between the bookmark view and your website. It’s a tiny button that usually confuses some novice users I know, but I can understand that’s no priority. However, the same kind of view pops up if you access ‘History’ from the menu. It’s something a lot of users find confusing, because these completely different content views are all accessed from different places and are dismissed differently (discounting tabs and undo). Firefox also does this wrong, using a separate sidebar for anything you might be able to imagine. No user wants to think “in what sidebar is this thing I need?”

There [are] two options to improve on Firefox’s models; you either take away all the crud, without reinventing the basic principle (Safari’s path), or you re-think browser interfaces from scratch, keeping in mind the paradigms of Mac OS X, and for example iTunes. Why can my mother buy a song in iTunes, while she can’t find a fun movie on the internet, or keep track of what’s happening in the world?  It then struck me that original ideas should be implemented to reduce the screen estate the interface would consume, and the pieces of the puzzle soon clicked together. What do you want in a browser? I’m sure I could ask any intermediate computer user and get a list of his most wanted features. Now try condensing that into a new browser, with the basic premise that the UI should be minimal.

In your “My dream browser” post you wrote “I am aware of several ‘new generation’ browser projects, but none really line up with my ideas.”  Can you share a few of these “new generation” projects and/or why you think they fall short?

The two projects that really [caught] my attention were Flock and Shiira; these two browsers are ideologically opposed to each other. Flock tried to make an integrated browsing experience and failed, in my opinion. The Mac version of Flock once counted no more than 10 buttons; these days, its toolbar is chock full of nondescript buttons and widgets. To me, it wasn’t just visually busy, but it was mostly a browser that seemed like a big hassle to get my head around. I just want something I don’t have to learn, while still being feature-packed. Shiira really did much better in this regard, but simply went a different direction, reinventing parts of the interface, making things more intuitive and visual, but in no way expanding on the feature set of browsers. I really want both; an intuitive browser that’s as functional for viewing web content as the Finder is for viewing files on your disk. Finder doesn’t just handle one format of files either; it can handle your content. And in my opinion, that’s what a browser should do today. Focus on content.

The feedback to both of your posts on the subject has been very positive based on the comments.  Have you gotten a lot of other feedback through email or by other means, and has it been just as positive?  Are there any instances where you received constructive criticism or even negative feedback?

I’ve gotten a lot of email from developers and people who really want to see this developed. I chatted with a few developers, but as I’m very occupied as a full-time icon and interface designer, I can’t oversee or manage such a project right now.

I’ve gotten more than enough constructive criticism and even negative feedback; from people saying my interface mockups are just ‘someone with Photoshop‘ to dismissing certain ideas or even calling me names for proposing to take away the tab bar when the sidebar is active. I think a lot of people misinterpret my designs; most think it’s intended to completely throw every interface paradigm in browsers today overboard, but that’s the opposite of my intention.

I want to make a browser with a more accessible and less cluttered interface. For loose ideas, like the ‘Time Machine’ view for history I mocked up, criticism is fierce, while I’ve always mentioned that it is just a mock-up of a more visual way to view your history for one website, suggesting a different view for all website history. But most people who express the most intense critique fail to offer any real better solutions to the problem.

In your “Latitude” post, you wrote “Several developers have contacted me with the desire to develop it, and some have already actively begun programming whole aspects of it.”  Can you share what aspects have already gone under development?

Thanks to Apple’s WebKit, developers are able to implement a multitude of my interface ideas and gauge the feasibility other features I suggested . Currently, basic work is being done on making more intelligent sidebar behavior, fullscreen browsing, and changing things like Downloads and Bookmarks from their conventional format to something ready for the sidebar.

Will you be making the design document and centralized website you mentioned in that same post available for public consumption, or are you trying to limit it to only those actively working on the project?

I intend to make this as open as possible, and I hope all developers working on the project are eager to allow other people to chip in and collaborate to make a better browser reality.

I noticed some criticism of Firefox in your other blog entries.  Is this your primary web browser today?  If so, what do you think are its biggest shortcomings?

Although Firefox is not my primary web browser (Safari is), it is one of the most used browsers today, and the last beta version for OS X showed an interface that is absolutely nonstandard and horribly designed. I think Firefox, while aiming for a ‘good’ look and feel on all platforms, really fails to deliver on any, with perhaps the notable exception of Linux. As I said in the response to your first question, the lack of invention in the interface causes the user to go on a quest to find the features he needs, and disappoints most of the time in providing them.

Have you put any thought into working your visual design ideas into an already existing platform (e.g. Firefox) via extensions or themes in order to bypass all of the work that goes into creating a new rendering engine, etc.?

As I said in my response to question 4, WebKit already allows this, and thanks to that, I can deliver the interface in full Cocoa glory. Firefox (with the exception of Camino) still uses XUL to render its interface, which is something I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot cattle prod. Also, I think drastically changing the structure and interface of a browser like Firefox would require so much more than an extension, that working ‘from scratch’ is automatically the preferred option.

If readers of Browsersphere are interested in contributing, what kinds of help are you looking for?

Anything! If you can code a website, feel free to drop an email, but especially (talented) developers are encouraged to contact me to get details on the project before the official website goes live.

Tags: Camino, Development, Features, Firefox, Flock, Interviews, Mac, Minor Players, Mock-ups, Safari, WebKit

I ran across two lists of Firefox alternatives tonight, the first of which is War of the Web Browsers: The Underdogs.  It covers Avant, Flock and Opera, while Download Dispatch, Weekend Edition covers those plus Maxthon and a browser I hadn’t yet heard of: Slim Browser.

Mozilla needn’t be too worried, though.  As this Digg post points out, Firefox still tops Google’s list.

Tags: Avant, Digg, Firefox, Flock, Google, Maxthon, Minor Players, Mozilla, Opera