Wired Wired World: Breaking the Mosaic Mold

Many of us have been watching the recent goings-on at Netscape and wondering what it all means. The layoffs in general, the cancellation of in-house Java development, and the Communicator source-code giveaway have received most of the attention, but another unsettling item has gone largely unnoticed. As of February 1998, Netscape no longer maintains a staff of usability engineers. At its zenith, the Netscape usabili-ty team was a top-notch organization of engineers and designers conducting a steady stream of studies aimed at bringing the best in end-user software to their customers. For those of us who believe the user interface is one of the last great frontiers in computer science, it was satisfying to see a software giant making usability an integrated part of the software engineering process. But Netscape doesn't do usability anymore. From Client to Server As interactive software becomes more complicated, usability becomes more essential to software engineering. Most Internet users today understand next to nothing about what a computer is or how it works. To them, the interface is the application. Netscape realized this and made addressing it an important part of their business. So why would a company that has clearly championed usability throughout its short but influential history now turn its back on it so completely? The most likely explanation seems to be that Netscape is in the midst of wholesale changes in their business model and view of their " core " products. They seem to be shifting most of their weight from the client to the server side of the house, and pulling out of the end-user software business. This means that you and I will no longer be using software designed and built entirely by Netscape. Of course, they will likely have a hand in the underlying fabric of Internet software for many years to come, but it seems doubtful that they will be designing end-user software in the near future. Specifically, they won't be designing interfaces. Netscape is relying on third-party developers to work the client side of their business while they focus on the servers. Beyond Mosaic This brings us to a potential benefit of the Communicator source code giveaway: we may finally begin to see some variation in Web browser software. The sad truth is that while NCSA did a stellar job of designing Mosaic 1.0 back in early 1993, they designed it to support HTML 1.0, a …