Browse the Web in 3D with Pogo

Browse the web in 3D! No - I am not talking about Lively or Piclens. I am talking about Pogo - A Web Browser. Taking Pogo on a ride, you clearly notice some differences straight away that sets it apart from the other players in the browser arena.

First and most awkwardly indigestible: it’s by AT&T, yes the telecom company. There are however a lot of other differences too as you will see shortly. I was able to try the limited beta and here is my experience with Pogo.

The System Requirements

Despite having no video card I decided to try it, the screen shots looked amazing and I just had to try! For those of you interested in a little background Pogo is based on the Mozilla project and uses technology by Vizible.

Here is a quick run down of Pogo :

No Tabs

Fire up Pogo and Pogo has no tabs. What? No Tabs? What am I supposed to do with such a browser? But wait lets not get ahead of ourselves here because tabs in Pogo are called “Cells” and live towards the bottom of the browser. The cells are one ahead on the tab as they contain visual clues to the websites that’s open in that cell. Kind of like a thumbnail preview - in fact it is a thumbnail preview!

The Pogo Dock

The tab bar of your browser becomes the Pogo Dock - true to its name it “docks” all the cells. You can resize the dock to increase/decrease the size of the cell thumbnails, rearrange thumbnails or set it to auto hide.

Bookmarks

Just like most modern browsers Pogo allows you to bookmark pages you like and additionally you can tag them. However, what’s unlike other browsers is the way you can access the bookmarks when you need them. When you access your bookmarks you don’t get a menu list but you get visual representations of actual pages dancing around on your screen at your command! This is what I am talking about:

Collections

Collections lets you organize and tag your bookmarks so that you can easily find them later when you need them. Collections are accessible via an interface similar to bookmarks. Click on a collection and all the web pages in that collection are presented on the main springboard from where you can view/edit them.

Visual History

Looking for a page you visited last week? Thinking to use the History? Well hit it and you will be overwhelmed at what you see. The history is shown as a sort of iTunes Cover flow animation but only it’s a little better. You can search for a page you are looking for or can browse the history with your mouse or keyboard. It also provides textual clues to the pages that are down the line on either side of the currently selected front page.

Spring Board

The spring board is like the Opera speed dial, but again with lots of extras and eye candy. It’s like a home page where you can keep the pages you like to visit often for “1-Click Access”. You can add as many pages to the Spring Board as you like and you will get a thumbnail preview of all of them.

Search

The default search is using Google and Ask. Once you click on a result for a search it gets stored as “click From the search” and then you can access it later with Visited Pages. The browser also displays sponsored results for the search term!

Pogo Search

This is a nice feature which allows you to search through everything from within “Your Pogo”. In other words you can search the “Collections”, “Bookmarks”, “History” and the “Search History” using this neat feature.

All in all, my take is that Pogo needs a system that is more than what a majority of people on the internet have. I for one wanted to create a screencast instead of screenshots but it won’t just happen alongside Pogo running (so the video from the Pogo Site! ). I have 1 GB of RAM if that’s the reference you would like to take. They need to get down those requirements to make Pogo a success. They actually have done it in past when then released this version.

Its still in limited beta so you would have to give your details and willingness to participate in the beta to get an invite. We tried to get invites for the Make Use Of readers but Pogo didn’t answer our requests unfortunately.

Have you used Pogo? Would you like to? What do you think about Pogo’s take on browsing?

By Varun Kashyap - Programmer, Blogger and Tech enthusiast, who likes to maintain and keep his system working nice! He blogs about tips, tricks, tutorials, latest on the web on his TechCrazy Blog