waffle

This post is about Rouse.

Part of the official goal of Rouse is to be like OmniWeb 5. This might cause some people pause. There’s the moral argument, the technical argument and the juridical argument.

The moral argument goes like this: don’t steal the nice man’s work. On the contrary, OmniWeb 5 will remain when I’m done. Ideas cannot be stolen, they can only be copied. The Omni Group did a marvelous job of inventing a few of the features in OmniWeb 5 that were so ahead of its time that I still can’t just switch to another browser, even heavily tricked out, and retain everything, and they deserve all the credit they get for that.

But ideas are meant to be spread, and ideas push the state of the art forward and advance mankind. Someone copied the first implementation of tabbed browsing. Someone copied the first implementation of embedded images in a web page. Someone copied offline mode, saving web pages to disc, browser history, browser bookmarks, adjustable text size, user stylesheets, cookies, pop-up blocking, private browsing, download managers, DOM inspectors… The idea that you can’t adopt and improve on someone else’s design is bunk.

The technical argument goes like this: by copying an existing design, you are doomed to not understand it. That’s more true. Whoever reimplements tabbed browsing in Rouse will probably relive the same worries The Omni Group did when they first implemented thumbnail tabs. But this is a lot more applicable when it comes to a large change; travel back in time and hand an Apple ][ developer an iPad and they wouldn’t know where to start because they missed not only the internal development of it but the internal development of every interim product, the release of every product (competitor or not), the advancement of technology and the way the whole market reacted in the time period that has passed.

With individual cherry-picked features, there are still surprises or things that we may not grasp, but they are surely more limited in scope and scale such that it will be possible to deal with.

The juridical argument is that if someone does this, The Omni Group will sue the pants off of them. With all my heart, I hope it’s not so because I don’t believe they’re that evil, jealous or protective. But with all my brain, I also know that there wouldn’t be much in it for them. OmniWeb is freeware and approaching abandonware simply by the level of other successful products that they ship and the comparatively large amount of work that it is to maintain it such as it is constructed today, with a WebKit fork at its center. I think they would be much more likely to release OmniWeb as open source rather than to sue anyone who copied their features. Their most visible user interface feature is thumbnail tabs, and Opera’s got a version of it.