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Has the Browser Interface Always Been the Same? We Think Not.

by Matthew Zuras on September 6, 2010 at 10:00 AM

mosaic and google chrome browsers
Niraj Chokshi over at The Atlantic wrote that, despite Google's waxing nostalgic upon the changes to its Chrome browser over the past two years, the way we surf the Web hasn't really changed since the days of Mosaic. We smell a challenge!

We suggest that Chokshi take a look at pioneering 'net artist Olia Lialina's essay 'Prof. Dr. Style' -- required reading for new media artists and Web geeks. While Chokshi seems to think that Web browsers have always been the same, Lialina makes the case that early browsers gave users authority in how they interacted with a given page, and now "the concept 'End User = Designer' is long gone."

Chokshi limits his analysis to menu bar navigation tools, saying that "the basic interface remains the same, a row of buttons: new, open, back, forward, print, reload, stop, etc." Lialina points out, however, that various browser iterations have actually shaped the way the Web is designed and accessed. In the early days of Mosaic, page colors, fonts and margins were determined not by the author, but by the user's browser preferences; she references a 1994 Wired article by Gary Wolfe: "The beauty of this approach is that it allows maximum openness and flexibility. All World Wide Web documents are similar, but every World Wide Web reader, or browser, can be different." Now those styling attributes come pre-programmed in every page, whether with HTML, CSS or newer varieties of coding.

The navigation buttons that Chokshi laments for their sameness have undergone a shift in use since the beginnings of the Web, as well. Lialina writes how the concept of interlinked documents -- the foundation of the Web known as hypertext -- has fallen away in favor of a kind of looping labyrinth of navigation in modern pages: "Let's say you clicked the 'about' link, and you came to the 'about' page; the link 'about' will still be there, you can click it forever and it will reload the same page forever. That's what we call Zombie Links." Was this practice informed by the evolution of browsers from Mosaic to Chrome? We think so. But even if you're unsure, check out Chokshi's terror-of-old-age-inducing slide show of browsers from 1993 to the present and decide for yourself.

Tags: browser, chrome, google chrome, GoogleChrome, mosaic, niraj chokshi, NirajChokshi, olia lialina, OliaLialina, prof. dr. style, Prof.Dr.Style, The Atlantic, TheAtlantic, top, web browser, WebBrowser

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