Quickbrowse 1.0 was invented on sunny day a long, long time ago, in 1999,
in Miami Beach, when Marc Fest, then a fledgling freelance news correspondent,
was looking for a way of making his daily reading work load more efficient,
so he could spend more time on the beach.
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| Marc back when he used to write code on the
beach. (hi-res) |
To make a long story short,
what began as a hobby, in 2000 became a small Internet company funded with
half a million dollars, credited with inventing metabrowsing, and with lots of press. Then, around 2005, Quickbrowse became a hobby again - since it hadn't "quite" turned into a Googlish bonanza. Unlike other metabrowsers, Quickbrowse stuck around.
As the years went by, Quickbrowse was becoming less and less useful, as the original approach of bunching together code from many separate pages
into a single file was working with fewer and fewer modern Web sites because
of their increasing complexity. It was like trying to do transplants, with
the organ rejections becoming increasingly violent.
Marc, who loves reading the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the
Miami Herald and his RSS feeds on Netvibes every day, was missing the ability to use the Quickbrowse Method to accelerate his daily
read. He started thinking about how to reinvigorate quickbrowsing.
It seemed possible to overcome the technical problems by building Quickbrowsing into a browser, just like tabbed browsing. Unlike in 1999, the perfect browser for such an approach now existed: Firefox, with its open-source platform had a lively
ecosystem of thousands of developers creating functionality add-ons all the
time.
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| Baldvin Kovacs is a software whiz with some very interesting projects himself. Click here to find out more about Baldvin. |
In January 2007, Marc sent an email to 200 or so Firefox developers in
which he explained his idea for a Quickbrowse plugin for Firefox and offered
compensation in return for development of the code. This started
a discussion among the developers about whether it was OK for Marc to
contact so many of them at once, and about whether he might be a fraud.
One of these developers was Baldvin Kovacs, a young programmer
who lives in Budapest, Hungary, with his wife and two sons. Within a
few weeks, Baldvin had created a prototype, proving that a quickbrowsing feature could indeed be integrated into Firefox. Over the course of almost 11 months, Marc and Baldvin usually skyped Saturdays, connecting between
Miami Beach, Florida, and Budapest, Hungary, and moving the project ahead slowly, as a weekend activity. The point was to keep it fun and stress-free and take into account the limited time available to both (Baldvin worked as a programmer for a German insurance giant at the time, Marc is vice president of communications for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The skype calls often evolved from talk about the intricacies of "auto-sizing Quickbrowse containers" to the political situation in Hungary, and the world at large, and to Baldvin's own Internet-related ideas. Marc learned a few words of Hungarian along the way.
More than a year later, in March 2008, Baldvin and Marc decided that the new Quickbrowse plugin for Firefox was ready to be released as a beta version. Marc had already been
using it for months, accelerating his daily read every morning, and happy that Quickbrowsing has become part of his daily routine again.
Stay tuned.
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