netrik pseudo-FAQ
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What is a pseudo-FAQ?

"Pseudo-FAQ" is a synonym for "Q&A" (Question and Answer.)

A real FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is a list of (you guess it ;-) ) questions people ask very often about some topic, and a canned response for each one. The aim is to prevent answering the same questions again and again. There is a FAQ for (almost) every newsgroup, for example.

A pseudo-FAQ is a similar list of questions and answers, only that the questions weren't really asked often yet; it contains questions the author believes people might want to ask...

Why are you such an arrogant asshole? (Netrik is not the best browser ever!)

I'm not. I only pretend.

That's a psychological trick. If we show (overly) self-confident, people will more likely believe that netrik will succeed. Thus we get more users and especially developers :-)

Why are you always speaking of "we"? It seems more like that you have made all this by yourself!

I have.

That's a psychological trick, too. I wanted people to believe netrik already is a successful project with multiple developers. That's more likely to attract new users and developers than a one-man-project. My plan was kind of "crossed" ;-) by the fact that there actually are already other developers now...

Why are you telling all this if you wanted to use this "tricks"? (s.a.)

Honesty creates confidence :-) And it's better than people finding out the "lies" themselfs...

Are you a psychologist? (s.a.)

No, I'm not. I'm not even talented a bit. But I like this stuff :-)

Don't you consider it disgusting to use all this psychological tricks to get some attention? (s.a.)

No. We firmly believe that netrik really deserves success, and we consider all methods to faciliate this being legitimate.

Your "humor" is disgusting! Why do you put this "jokes" all over the site?

Humor is important to create sympathy. Sadly, my sense of humor isn't very good. If you think your own is better, please help us making this site really funny.

Why are there so many grammatical errors on this page?

I'm not a native speaker. If you are (or if the errors are such obvious that you see them even not being one), please help us correct them.

Are there also useful answers here?

Not much yet, but they will come with time... We wanted to put up the most important first ;-)

Why starting a new project instead of hacking on an existing one?

This is quite a long story...

There are a couple of reasons (maybe we'll make a more extensive site on this some time...), why hacking on any of the text mode browsers we know about couldn't satisfy us. Some of them are mentioned on the overview page.

One reason is that they are all fairly simple, and almost a complete rewrite would be necessary to implement many of the features we want to have. Also, we do not like some details about all of the existing clients; the project maintainers probably wouldn't like to change them for us. Finally, it doesn't seem that any of the authors of that programs (except maybe Links) is planning to make a "bigger" project of it, like netrik is; they obviously intend to keep the programs simple, while netrik will have many advanced features.

And why not forking an existing project? (s.a.)

That question is even harder to answer. All in all, we think that we wouldn't gain too much by that, as we would need almost a complete rewrite anyhow. Meanwhile, we would have to take care not to break all the existing features; implementing our own ideas may be harder than starting from scratch.

Generally, by forking we could have a usable browser much faster -- but writing from scratch gives us more opportunities to create real innovations :-)

What about retawq?

Well, retawq has very similar goals to netrik (though a *bit* less ambitious, it seems), and looks quite interesting -- only it came too late :-(

When the author announced it at SourceForge and Freshmeat, we were already hacking on netrik for a long time. It's really sad we didn't know earlier -- we could have done something together, instead of working on two projects doing more or less the same :-(