Browsers
The good people over at Adaptive Path have spent some time imagining a near-future web browser called Aurora. The core concepts—structured data replacing monolithic pages, algorithmic grouping of related items, minimized chrome, screen-sharing, etc—are all fairly familiar (to people working on this stuff), but it’s always good to have someone pull the elements together into a coherent vision. I’m looking forward to the rest of the videos.
One aesthetic complaint, however: compared to its inspiration (Starfire), the Aurora video is conspicuously (and unrealistically) pleasant. The people in Starfire are dealing with problems. Granted, they are overcoming them via technology, but at least the situations are tense to begin with. Here, the people seem not to have any problems (not even the weather!). I guess I prefer a bit more angst in my fake future.
OK, so… Flock. I should caveat this with the fact that I’ve spent all of 10 minutes using Flock. But, well… a browser?!? Good luck to ya. (ps - remember deepleap? So. Very. Ahead of its time.)
Wonderful. A new browser. Rejoice. On the other hand, I guess it’s nice to have some competition again. But how embarrassing for Netscape/AOL.
Just updated my MSIE to 5.2 (OSX). The default setting seems to be to antialias all text…. Ok, a little poking around reveals that there is some mysterious set of conditions (including, but not limited to, text being below 11px in size) that will turn antialising off. But, dangnabbit, why can’t I specify antialiasing on or off in CSS, like: .leetleText { font: 11px Georgia; font-smoothing: none; } Or somesuch?
Netscape 6 was released way too early. Well, actually, it was released way too late, but way before it was ready. Feh!
IBM relaunches browser for the blind. Costs bucks, but there’s a free download. (via evolt)
Reading The Browser is Dead, I’m aware of this huge divide between how artists and engineers think, even when they’re talking about the same exact thing. I see this article about the need for different browsers to facilitate different experiences as an intimate but otherworldly companion to techy rants about XUL or “pervasive computing.” As an aside, I’m proud to be able to think about both the former and the latter. (via webmonkey)
AOL Browser Features and Functionality Table.. cripes, AOL’s 500 trillion users use 16 different browsers. The most unsettling line in the chart is: “DHTML: Still being tested” (not that a “yes” or “no” would mean much). (via xblog)
I haven’t installed it yet, but this level of extensability fires me up about Mozilla: Alphanumerica’s Total Recall recovers your browser state after a crash. (via cam, of course)
Alertbox: Eyetracking Study of Web Readers reports on research that shows that people “interlace” multiple web sites; that is, they have multiple browser windows open and switch back and forth, reading several sites at once. This is one of those things that I do all the time, but it never occurred to me to take it into consideration at design time. I certainly will from now on. ps—I really wish Jakob would stop trying to get people to use the default link colors; that horse is dead and rotting.