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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Thursday, November 6, 2003

14:45 - You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means
http://avantbrowser.com/

(top)

Look! Just what the world needs. It's "Avant Browser", a new addition to the browser pantheon... and not just any browser, a tabbed browser.

...Except that what they think "tabbed" means is not even vaguely related to what the rest of the world means by the term.

This isn't tabbed browsing. This is MDI. "Tabbed browsing" is a well-established term by now, and it means something specific. MDI is not what it means. (Okay, tabbed browsing is a form of the MDI concept, but it's nothing like what we see here.)

This is what Opera did in about 1996. And it sucked butt then, so they got rid of it.

This is what happens when some dork doesn't learn from history.

God damn, how I hate MDI. A big gray box, with lots of little windows inside it, each one with its own title bar and control buttons. I mean, just look at this PR screenshot-- I have a hard time imagining a publicity photo that would make a worse impression on anybody trying to maximize his screen real estate. I count eight separate sets of window-control buttons (minimize, maximize, close), in their big bulgy XP-ish selves, which along with the title bars and all the control buttons (and the row of tabs along the bottom, which I guess is what the author thinks makes Avant Browser a "tabbed browser") take up fully half the application window's usable space.

This isn't a step forward for UI design. It's a plummet backwards into the dark ages.

The whole point of "tabbed browsing" is to view multiple documents maximized within the browser window, so you minimize the overhead incurred by window widgets and all the wasted gray space you get in an MDI window. Even MDI applications, like Excel, keep separate documents as individual tabs in the system taskbar. But Avant Browser seems to want to throw all that out the window and go back to a metaphor that was ridiculous six years ago, let alone today (now that WinXP's title bars are that much bigger than before).

True, Avant Browser apparently lets you "maximize" these sub-windows like any good MDI application, effectively making it act the same way as Mozilla or Firebird or Safari or any of the other browsers that behave in what we now know as a "tabbed" manner. But to put Web pages into multiple floating windows within a container window-- gaah. There's a reason nobody does this anymore, and that reason ought to become very clear after about three minutes of trying to use it. (That's how long it took me to get sick of Opera when it tried this "innovation".)

The site reads like a parody. The FAQ, amusingly, has as its second question: "Is Avant Browser spyware?" A thoroughly valid question, as these days you don't have to do any work to create a browser beyond wrapping your own shell around the IE engine (which is exactly what this guy did), giving it all the features-- and vulnerabilities and bugs-- of IE. A user would be entirely justified in wondering just what weird Trojans would be installed along with this thing. I sorta hate to give this site traffic by linking to it, too, because Chris tells me that Avant Browser reports referrer URLs to Web servers not as the URL of the previously visited page, but of the AvantBrowser.com site itself. This has to be intentional-- it can't be a bug. So it's designed to pollute people's Web server logs with the URL of its own distribution site, so (if the logs are public) the search-bots will pick it up and drive more traffic back to AvantBrowser.com. Why would they do this if there weren't spyware or hidden ads involved? Revolting.

The FAQ further reveals that the browser project is in fact the brainchild of one intrepid guy, who just really really loves MDI:

Avant Browser is an Application built with MDI (Multiple-Document-Interface) technology. With MDI technology, fewer system resources are used, web page loading is faster, and all opened pages can be easily controlled at user's pleasure.

Yeah, and I understand "Push" technology is the next big thing! And DHTML! And there's this great new thing called "Java"!

Oh, and on the main page, there's this:

Avant Browser now supports AI-RoboForm. AI-RoboForm can help you remember passwords and fill out any online form with just one click of a button. Passwords are securely stored on your computer and protected by a master password. You can find the latest RoboForm here.

Depending on the font, you might read this as I did: Al-RoboForm, a new terrorist organization that attacks in giant plodding mechs like in The Matrix: Revolutions. Complete with a total lack of frontal armor, at that, so you can fight them off with rocks if they start stomping their way up out of the East River.

Geez. Poor guy. I wonder who thawed him out.