Most people don’t know this, but the Internet technology we use every day is antiquated compared to what it could and should be. There are many reasons for it, but some of them are just political. For example, the Internet was a huge threat to Microsoft. And they are smart and used to be fierce competitors. They knew the Internet meant a Google would show up one day. That’s why they developed Internet Explorer to compete with Netscape.
After they defeated Netscape, they stopped developing Internet Explorer altogether…until Firefox came around and forced them back to the table.
When and how did they really defeat Netscape? That’s a bit of history discussed often enough but not properly covered in my opinion. Netscape just kind of fizzled after AOL bought them. AOL pretty much stopped improving it. And a few years later, so did Microsoft.
I always suspected that when AOL bought Netscape, they cut some kind of deal with Microsoft to kill development. This was all speculation to me for a long time. I did recently meet a developer who was with Netscape before and after the sale, and while I won’t go into detail, let’s just say the conversation was more than a little interesting…
How sad. The Internet has an impact on almost everyone’s life these days. How can development just have stopped dead like that? Even if you accept that business is business, with the money out there impacted, something should have happened a lot sooner than it did. I would have expected some sharp CEOs or VCs to realize the monumental opportunity this represented and jump in.
Marc Andreessen said a few years ago that Netscape planned about 18 different things for navigation. There are so many things that could have been better, but what can you do?
Fortunately, one teenager decided to work on Firefox, showing up the entire business world who it seems would have left well enough alone. It’s so ridiculous. Maybe we can get another teenager to do for email what Blake Ross did for browsing?
But back to browsing and the point of this post. How is it, in 2007, that the control for where a link gets opened, same window, new window, new tab, is left up to the whims of the webmaster rather than the user? This whole target=”_blank” idea sucks. It was good when the Internet was new, but now?
One person wants it in a new window, another in the same window. While you can override the default with a right click and dropdown, you have no visual cue as to how the link is set. And if a link is set to open in a new window, you have no override. Many times a day I find myself copying a link and pasting it into the browser window. What a waste of time. This whole concept needs to be better integrated in the browser. What do I suggest?
- For a first phase, there should be a visual cue as to how a link will open. It doesn’t have to be visible until a mouseover at which time a tiny icon would appear on the right.
- In addition to the icon on the right, a mouseover could show two or three icons on top of the link. One could be to open in a new tab. Another could be to open in a new window. A third could be to open target=”_top”.
- Then you would just need to move the mouse up a bit and click.
I’m not sure if this is clear. I mocked up a few pictures. They aren’t that great but hopefully enough to get the message across.
The first one is the initial view before mousing over the link.
The second image shows you what would show up if you moused over a link. There would be the little icon on the right. Now you know that link opens in a _blank screen.
In addition to the previous suggestion, this one shows two more icons on top, letting you choose if the link should open in a new window or a new tab.
All with one mouseover and one click, no right clicking.
I’m sure this can be done with a Greasemonkey script, but I’d love to see Firefox lead the way with this as a new feature.
What do you all think?