Second look and invites for AT and T's improved Pogo web browser

AT&T both intrigued and confused us back in April when it announced Pogo, a new Mozilla-based web browser (of all things) that they're testing in a very private beta. It's notable for some new ideas about how web browsers should present information, and we found some of them interesting when we gave Pogo a thorough testing. But the remarkably heavy system requirements needed to come down out of the clouds for Pogo to attract much of an audience. Today, AT&T told us that a new private beta is ready to roll, and the system requirements have been significantly reduced—the company gave us 500 invites to share with Ars Technica readers so you could see for yourself.

Not much has changed about Pogo's UI or functionality since we first reviewed it, so we aren't going to rehash much of our previous coverage. In a nutshell, Pogo is AT&T's first step into an increasingly competitive web browsing market, one that's heavy on visual flourishes. Really heavy. Pogo uses baroque 3D scrolling visualizations to present categories of thumbnailed bookmarks and your browsing history, as well as a Dock to present open pages in thumbnailed "cells" (tabs, in normal speak). There's even an Opera-esque Springboard that presents a grid of your favorite sites for easy access.

Back in April, though, Pogo's heavy emphasis on a visual UI (one that sometimes eschews usability) came with a price in terms of performance that was surprisingly high. The minimum system requirements included a 1.6GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a video card with at least 256MB of VRAM. This obviously meant that we couldn't take Pogo for a spin in any Windows virtualization apps, but it turned out that some respectable PCs with very capable video cards couldn't even handle it. When we brought out the big hardware guns, Pogo still brought the machine to its knees with barely three tabs cells open. At that point, it was clear why Pogo was available only in a very private beta.

Now Pogo is back with some significant performance enhancements and system requirements that have been cut virtually in half. While there aren't any whiz-bang new features, Pogo can now run with a 1.0GHz processor, 1.0GB of RAM, and a video card with 128MB of VRAM. Since Pogo was arguably doing fine in the whiz-bang department already, we figured it was worth another spin.

This time around, we installed Pogo beta 1.1 on a Vista Home Premium install running native on a quad-core 2.6GHz Mac Pro with 3GB of RAM and a GeForce 7300 GT video card sporting 256MB of VRAM. We hit the ground running by opting to have Pogo import our del.icio.us bookmarks—all 1,680 of them—which took well over 10 minutes. Initially we assumed that Pogo was preemptively caching a thumbnail for every bookmark it imported as it went. Unfortunately, we were asked to create said cache after the import process' "all done!" ding woke us up.

Pogo's attempt to render lists of bookmarks as old 'n busted
Again, we won't rehash all the different visuals that Pogo brings to things like bookmarks and browsing history. While our test machine this time around is actually a bit lighter-weight than the Opteron 256 with two 3GHz CPUs (as well as 4GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA 8800 GT video card with 512MB of VRAM) that we maxed out our testing on last time, we're happy to report that Pogo's performance has improved quite a bit. While just three open pages rendered Pogo useless back in April, Pogo remained acceptably responsive with as many as 6-10 pages open.

That said, our Quad Mac Pro test machine is still well above Pogo's new minimum system requirements, which makes us wonder just how well such a UI-intensive browser will perform on most people's computers, which are probably closer to Pogo's minimum system requirements than to the "recommended" stats.

On a more general level, after our second time around the block with Pogo, we wound up questioning how useful the visually rich UI actually is. Playing with Pogo again and putting its notable features through the ringer left us wondering if Pogo's developers watched Minority Report one too many times.

But don't take our word for it—the Pogo team wants to give Ars Technica readers 500 invites so you can take it for a spin yourselves. Just head over to the Pogo site and enter "r3STRPgV" as your invite code, but make sure your machine meets the default system requirements (we know: it feels weird having to warn you guys about system requirements). If you fire Pogo up though, definitely let us know what you think about it and the specs of the machine you're running it on.