Friday, April 18, 2008

AT&T launches its own browser, Pogo.

Pogo is a combination of the Mozilla browser code base with technology from Vizible, which drama.

Things only get weird when you dive into the browser bookmarks or history, or use the multi-homepage feature called Springboard.
AT&T has invested in. As a basic Web browser it works as expected. Type a URL and it loads. No

For these three functions, Pogo puts snapshot images, which it calls "cells," into a slick 3D rendering engine. In the bookmark feature, for example, you can thumb through categories like flipping through index cards. When you zoom into a category, you see all your site bookmarks as snapshots of your pages, not just page titles.

The history function also uses visual snapshots. I found this very useful. Seeing your previously-visited sites in graphic format added a lot of context that's missing if all you're looking at is a stream of titles.

You can set the browser's homepage to be your "springboard," which is a grid of cells for sites you visit a lot. It's a little better than having your browser start with several homepages in separate tabs, although it's not a big enough feature that anyone should switch browsers for it.

Pogo is a tabbed browser, but instead of using text tabs it uses little page snapshots. This may appeal to some people; I didn't find it much of an advantage.

All cells, be they on the Springboard, the history, or bookmarks, can be tagged and moved around (you can drag history items to the Springboard, for example). The browser also has a search feature that scans for pages living in the the three sections just mentioned. For Web search, Pogo remembers the pages you visit from its integrated search engine (Google, currently), and saves them as cells, too.

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