The other day, Sebastiaan de With of Cocoia wrote a blog post entitled “My Dream Browser”.
This immediately grabbed my attention and reminded me of a few ideas I had a while ago for changes in the browser space.
Here is one of the images he posted to visualise his ideas:
The internet browser market is currently moving quickly in terms of new competition with the release of Safari for Windows, and Firefox 3 in beta, but in terms of design and UI it has been a while since any major changes took place.
The problem with current browsers is they are not designed for the new ways we are using the internet – RSS feeds are a late addition in the whole scheme of things, downloads are resigned to a small window in the background, and other media such as video and photos are still embedded into pages with no easy way of cutting through the clutter.
With this growing multitude of content flying around, perhaps a more organised approach would enable users to collect and share information online easily and efficiently.
Looking at iTunes, the most popular media software in the world, media is organised into groups of Music, Videos, TV Shows, Purchased Content, and then User Defined selection (Playlists). What if a similar approach was taken to the web? It would make sense – imagine being able to see all of the videos you have watched in the last week in a single list, with the ability to play any of them all from one page. Imagine you are downloading a 90 page PDF while also downloading a new app from your friend’s site, as well as downloading the latest movie trailer from the Quicktime site and being able to monitor all your downloads, and see what type of media each of them are, without even leaving the current window.
That’s our dream browser.
We also had some UI ideas of our own, some of which we are working on bringing into GoSquared itself sometime in the future.
You may remember, a while ago we wondered “why isn’t CoverFlow in Safari?“, well we still wonder, and it would definitely be in the browser of our dreams. CoverFlow wasn’t the only idea we had though…
Take this scenario:
I find an image I really like on a page and want to share it with a friend or a colleague. Currently, I copy and paste the image into my favourite email client (Mail), fill out the “To:” field with his or her name, and maybe leave a little comment in the “Subject:” field, then maybe another little “Yo, check this out” in the body field, and then I hit send.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do this:
Drag the image to my friend’s name in the sidebar, and wait for it to arrive in his inbox.
The ability to do things like this would drastically improve the way people communicate ideas on a regular basis.
We have a few more ideas, and this blog post could run on for another few days, but for now we would love to hear what you guys and girls think.
We are actively working on the browser to make it a reality – Danny Greg from Crimson Sky Software is the lead developer on this project and he is just as passionate as we are about creating this awesome browser.
If you would like to help out, or have any ideas of your own, please let us know below!
