AT&T Pogo

» see pogobrowser.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

AT&T announced Pogo on 17 April 2008. It was a web browser built on the Mozilla engine, the same foundation as Firefox, with Vizible's 3D rendering layered over the top so that tabs and bookmarks appeared as objects you could move around rather than as lists of text.

Vizible was a Toronto company that made digital media interfaces, and the partnership made a certain kind of sense in 2008. AT&T wanted a surface it owned between its customers and the web, which is a thing carriers have wanted continuously since dial-up and have almost never gotten. Vizible had the visual technology and no distribution. Each side supplied what the other lacked.

A private beta went out to a limited group, with invites circulating in June 2008. That is as far as it went. There was never a public release, so the entire user base of AT&T Pogo is the set of people who got an invite and installed the thing out of curiosity.

~ the record ~

~ the demo ~

The feature list reads like a set of answers to questions nobody had asked. You could keep multiple home pages instead of one, and open tabs showed up as thumbnails on a visual wall rather than as a row of titles. Bookmarks and history were arranged spatially, with search across both. Reviewers at the time described it as good-looking and heavy, which is the standard verdict on every 3D browser interface ever shipped, and it is the reason there are no 3D browser interfaces.

~ what it became ~

On 8 April 2009 Open Text bought Vizible. The Canadian software company wanted the visualization and presentation technology for its Digital Media line, which is to say it wanted the rendering engine for enterprise document work. The browser was not part of what it had paid for, and with the IP sold there was nobody left to build it. Pogo ended there, eleven months and change after the announcement.

Nothing about this reached Turkey. AT&T is a US carrier with no presence here, the beta was invite-only inside its own customer base, and by 2009 the browser conversation among people I knew was entirely about whether Chrome was fast enough to leave Firefox for. Pogo is a product I learned about years later from a category list of dead browsers, and I suspect that is true of almost everyone who has ever heard of it.

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