First look: AT&T?s Pogo browser beta tries too hard, fails

Integrated graphics need not apply

AT&T has opened up a private beta of its new, hyper-visual web browser named Pogo. Yes, you read that right—AT&T is diving into the web browser market with a new creation of its own, based on Mozilla and 3D technology from Vizible, a Canada-based company that AT&T has invested in. The goal is to create a web browsing experience that is more robust than the crufty old browsers that we have all grown accustomed to. The software is not yet open to the public, but we had an opportunity to test out Pogo and see what it was all about.

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? It is, and as we found out, these requirements posed some major challenges for us during our testing.

Installation 

Upon installation, Pogo warns you if you're attempting to install it on a machine with less than 256MB of VRAM but allows you to press ahead if you wish. If you don't have 256MB of VRAM though, we don't recommend that you take your chances—you'll find yourself wishing you had a time machine so you could go back in time to before you loaded it up, and beat yourself unconscious.

Emulation? Forget about it. We attempted to play with Pogo in a Parallels virtual machine running Windows XP on a Core 2 Duo iMac 2.16GHz with 2GB of RAM, but quickly found that the iMac's integrated graphics (running in a VM, no less) were not doing Pogo any favors. While the main portion of the application that displays web pages functioned (mostly) fine, anything that was even remotely "pretty" about Pogo would not display at all. This included parts of the UI and all of its functionality relating to bookmarks, history, springboards, and anything else. Since that's how you use the browser, we realized that this was not going to work.

Moving on, we tested Pogo on a dual-processor, dual-core AMD Opteron 2210 with 1.80GHz CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and a NVIDIA Quadro FX 560 video card with 128MB of VRAM running Windows XP. On this machine, the remainder of Pogo's features actually displayed, but did not do much else. We found that with even minor use, the browser slowed to a crawl, animations built into the UI were laggy, and at some times, unusable. Performance was extremely poor when even trying to perform basic functions like clicking UI elements.

We decided once again to step it up and run Pogo on a dual-processor Opteron 256 with two 3GHz CPUs, 4GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA 8800 GT video card with 512MB of VRAM. From here, we were finally able to use Pogo enough to actually find out how well it works—for the most part, anyway.

An all-new UI 

Pogo's UI is very different than most other web browsers—so different, in fact, that several of us found it difficult to figure out exactly how to do typical web-browsery things on it. It's not very intuitive compared to other browsers, and uses different terminology for many things because they are displayed differently than in other browsers. For example, Pogo uses "cells" instead of tabs, although they function just like tabs. Cells are thumbnail-sized icons of the pages you have open that sit in a little dock bar underneath your current web page.

The dock is the row of icons along the bottom, with snapshot "cells" functioning as tabs

This looks pretty, and certainly gives you an instantaneous, visual representation of the tabs you have open (reminiscent to OmniWeb). But looks are about all the dock and cells can offer—it's stuck at the bottom of the screen, so for those of us who like having tabs at the top, we're out of luck. Keeping a handful of cells open means you are going to take major performance hits and have your resources gobbled up too—on our Opteron 256 machine, Pogo began to slow down with just three cells open, and with more than that, it became stuttery and annoying to use.

Like Cover Flow in your browser

Some of the other features that AT&T brags about with Pogo are its unique methods of handling things like your bookmarks and history. From our experience, one of those unique things apparently includes "not allowing you to import your bookmarks from other browsers," though, because while it took over 10 minutes to do so on the Opteron 2210, Pogo crashed consistently while trying to do so on either of the two Opteron boxes we tested. Once you have a collection of bookmarks in, Pogo allows you to categorize them using tags and Collections, which are groups of bookmarks (like a bookmark folder).

You can't just look at a list of your bookmarks, though—oh no. Pogo offers up a visual, Cover Flow-like display for your bookmarks and collections that, like everything else, looks nice and operates slower than molasses. On the Opteron 256, it took several seconds to load in the first place, takes several seconds to navigate through each thumbnail, and several seconds to perform operations within them (such as, say, deleting a bookmark).

At one point, it took upwards of 20 seconds to switch to a collection that had lots of bookmarks in it. We found it frustrating to navigate and the performance made it completely impractical for normal, everyday use. Thankfully, since Pogo is based on Mozilla, a simple Control+I brings up your bookmarks in textual mode (although AT&T doesn't tell you about this anywhere).

Browsing your bookmarks, Pogo-style

Thankfully, Pogo's History feature performs much better. It, too, has a Cover Flow-like display (that is still different than the display for Collections), but for some reason is actually easy to scroll through. Pausing while scrolling through a visual representation of your history will show you what the site was and when you visited it.

Control-H will turn your history into text

Here, too, you can hit Control+H and get a textual view of your history like you would in another Mozilla-based browser. But again, AT&T doesn't advertise that you can do this, so people like your parents may not be able to figure that out on their own.