François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

Reported by Yahoo, Marc Andreessen laments that innovation on the browser is dead, has been dead since five years and nothing good is to come for the next five years:

Navigation is an embarrassment. Using bookmarks and back and forth buttons -- we had about eighteen different things we had in mind for the browser.

Well, if they were all comparable to the Javagator (a browser entirely written in Java) he fancied at the time, I'm dubious about the other 17! And it looks like, for Marc, innovation stopped around Netscape 4.5 and the launch of the Mozilla project (take that, Mozillans!). Why did he kept those innovations locked in his trunk at a time where Netscape, struggling against Microsoft but still enjoying a visible market share and notoriety, could have used them to regain ground?

For a second I had a nightmarish vision of the web seen through the "innovative Netscape client and its marketing portal" -- the only way to decipher the proprietary (but innovative) Netscape tag soup. Read between the lines and think about the importance of standards and compliant tools that secure universal access to information. One may not rank pop-up blocking and tab-browsing as innovations -- and that is debatable -- but I certainly do appreciate the time that browsers developers have taken to embrace web standards, proving that useful innovation is the full delivery of a simple promise appealing to all, not a half-baked dream appealing to a few techno geeks.

May be El Reg is right, Andreessen might be a secret IE user. I like their epitaph:

Andreessen left Netscape after its merger with AOL in 1999. Having once derided Windows as a poorly debugged device driver loader, Andreessen this Spring saw Netscape's parent AOL sign a seven year deal with Microsoft for the right to continue using Internet Explorer as the core of its client software.