I’m usually first in line for trying out a new browser.  I’ve tried Flock (and liked it tons) recently, Safari on both Windows and Mac, and most recently the new Firefox 3 betas (which are superb so far).  Today there is news of one that does not grab me a lot though.

AT&T has opened up a private beta of its new browser called Pogo.  It is supposed to be a ‘hyper-visual’ browser – using CoverFlow style treatment for bookmarks / favorites (which apparently is so slow as to be virtually unusable) and also for browsing history, which is said to work pretty well.  It also uses small ‘cells’ (its equivalent of tabs) that reside at the bottom of your browser screen and offer a more visual representation of what’s in each cell.

Ars Technica has done a mini-review of this (admittedly very early) beta, and things do not sound great.  In fact, they sound a lot like a phone company trying to make a browser   The main complaints with the current beta version seem to be some pretty terrible performance issues, and some ridiculously high system requirements:

First off, Pogo is Windows-only, and AT&T makes no indication that it will be available for the Mac anytime soon (or ever). It requires Windows XP SP2 or later or Windows Vista, and its minimum hardware are surprisingly steep: a 1.6GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a video card with at least 256MB of VRAM. Seem like a bit much for a web browser?

That just sounds crazy.  No matter how early the beta is, how the hell does a web browser demand that sort of resources?  I keep thinking that the trend should be towards lighter, more portable apps – not towards browsers that require you run a supercomputer.

The Ars Technica review is worth a read – you can catch it HERE – and let us know what you think of getting your browser from AT&T somewhere down the line …

Via: The Boy Genius Report

Tags: AT&T, Pogo, AT&T web browser