Surfing the Web has meant using much the same technology for years. Now startups are working on new ways to navigate the Net.
For years, the Web browser was a technology that seemed frozen in time. While the Web itself exploded with new types of content and virtual communities, the way users accessed that material changed hardly at all from 1997 to 2004 (not coincidentally, the years when Microsoft's Internet Explorer had a chokehold on the browser market).
Browster, a plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox, lets users preview other Web pages without leaving the current one, by moving a cursor over an icon appearing above each link. (Image courtesy of Browster.)
But now with a maturing base of open-source code for building Web tools, browser technology is thawing quickly -- and upstart software engineers are bringing into question some long-dominant assumptions about the way browsers can and should work.
Browster, for example, offers a free add-on for Internet Explorer and the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox browser that's a simpler alternative to using the "Back" button. The San Francisco company lets people viewing a Web page, say, a list of Google search results, see what lies beyond the hyperlinks simply by placing the mouse over those links -- without having to click on them or open a new window.
Meanwhile, companies like San Francisco-based Flock are developing entirely new browsers designed from the beginning to facilitate now-common social activities, such as blogging, RSS-based news reading, and photo sharing.
The new technologies promise to help Web browsers catch up with the Web itself -- which is bursting with material contributed by users themselves. "The Web today is very different from the Web of the '90s, which was very much a one-to-many experience," says Peter Andrews, a senior software engineer at Flock and the lead builder of Sage, an open-source extension for Firefox that speeds up the process of scanning through RSS feeds. "Now you have a growing community of producers building a many-to-many Web -- and browsers should integrate the functionality to support that."
Of course, new versions of the most popular Web browsers come along regularly. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 on April 24; Mozilla upgraded Firefox to version 1.5.0.4 on June 1. But while each release includes a few more bells and whistles -- IE7 allows tabbed browsing in imitation of Firefox, for example -- the basics of Web browsing haven't really changed since the University of Illinois's National Center for Supercomputing Applications created the first browser, Mosaic, in 1994.
Searchers move about the Web by left-clicking on hyperlinks. The browser responds to each click by opening a new page in the same window or, if the user chooses, a new tab or window. Returning to a previously viewed page -- such as a list of search results -- means either clicking the "back" button or switching tabs or windows.
This tried-and-true procedure works well enough, and has become so familiar that it feels preordained. But is it the best way? Is there room for change? Scott Milener thinks so. He and a friend, Wendell Brown, stumbled onto that subject while having lunch one day in 2004. "I asked Wendell, 'Have you noticed how much we hit the back button every day?' And he pushed me on the question. Of course the napkins started coming out, and we invented what Browster is today."
Once a user has installed the Browster plugin, placing the mouse's pointer over any hyperlink on a page causes a small icon to pop up. Hovering over that icon with the pointer makes a new "window" appear on top of the current page, showing the page to which the hyperlink connects.
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Guest (BootCamp)
Hi! Great article on web navigation and the future of clickless browsing. www.cooliris.com offers similar technology in the clickless browsing field. they have some other interesting products as well (bookmarks previewing etc.).
As for the 3d web navigation, there is a site, http://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/16/2317231.shtml makes for a very interesting read!
ciao
fernand
Guest
Browster is an .exe, Cooliris is an extension!
Thanks for the link on CoolIris - Browster is an executable, while Cooliris is a FireFox extension.
Much nicer for those of us using Firefox!
Guest (Hammerd)
Most of the "advanced" features that are touted seem to be geared to screaming at the top of their flashing visuals and key word links that want to hijack me to a webpage I don't want. If there is a next big thing in browsers, I pray it doesn't involve ads.
Guest (CatoTheElderII)
Yes, please stop the ads. Oh wait - the business model calls for more, not less, ads. Hmmm... anyway, what I don't want is to move my mouse over links and have the page either jump to that page or bring up a "preview" that takes just as long to open as if I had clicked on the page. I prefer if they leave the click action so I can choose when I want to navigate. Clickless idea sounds nice but I think it will result in an annoying tendency to gobble time doing things I don't explicitly want. Please - stop trying to "help" me! I can do the click! It ain't that hard!! kthnxbye.
And furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed!
Guest (nb)
what ad's ? i use firefox web browser + adblock extension + filterset.g updater extension. add in the scroogle search engine and use that instead of google. what ads ?
Guest (oyao)
this is quite useful when it will create "preview" for other searches
Guest (Alex Iskold)
Making the browser understand everyday objects
Another new trend in browser technologies is semantics. Microformats, flock and the work we are doing at adaptiveblue are all examples of harnessing interactions and semantics to drive productivity.
See my article in Web 2.0 magazine for overview on the topic:
http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/227524.htm
and checkout adaptiveblue.com to preview or 'smart browser' technology.
Alex
Guest
sdafcsdf
Guest (Venkatesh Kanchan)
"pre-fetches the pages for every result"
There goes your bandwidth, not to mention the pandora's box it will open in terms of security.
Guest (Joel)
Mouse-over previews and pay-per-click traffic
I'd be curious to find out how "previewing" these pages via mouse-overs affects sites who are paying the search engines for the number of click-throughs they get. Since the page is being opened up, this should count as a click-through, but if the page automatically closes when the mouse exits the link area, the value of this "click-through" would be much lower.
Also, I'm curious how allowing one to preview pages from search results can qualify as an interesting change in browsing methodology. The article makes the good point that browsers haven't changed much in 10/12 years. However, I think that it's innovations like Google's bookmark sync and Foxmark's bookmark synchronizer that may make a more significant change to the browsing experience, allowing one to access one's own bookmarks and config settings from any machine.
Guest (Nivi)
Oi, what about Songbird: http://songbirdnest.com
It is a media player with a built-in web browser that can get media from any web site in the world. As opposed to iTunes which only connects to the iTunes Music Store.
Songbird is also built on the Mozilla stack.
Check it out yo: http://songbirdnest.com
Nivi
Chief Songbird Elocutor
Guest (Aaron)
This piece of software for windows offers a new persepctive on browsing, by allowing the user to keep web-sites running like applications.
It allows costum actions like site notifications, drag-n-drop and shortcut menus. These can be added to existing sites by scripts or so-called 'Smart Bubbles'
Ruomors are their slated to release a cool version with a Flickr script on 13/6
Guest (Aaron)
Guest (Gil)
Wade's never heard of Opera? It had IE and Netscape beat YEARS ago and Firefox keeps adding "new" features Opera had long ago. Bone up on research, Wade.
Guest (hab)
For all of you moaning about the ads, how many of you are paying a subscription fee to avoid ads for those sites that give you a choice? And how many of you are thankful that we have all this free content BECAUSE the ads are enabling the websites to generate income and provide the content.
Just curious.
Guest (Levi Figueira)
Flock: "...entirely new browsers designed from the beginning (...)"
Not quite so...
I use Flock on a daily basis: it's my favorite browser!
But it's TOTALLY Firefox-based! It's more like a complete set of addons (those written from scratch with great new ideas and concepts) added to a standard mozilla/firefox codebase and with a new theme!
But it's a great option and I do recommend it :)
~Levi F.
Great article and comments! I love this stuff. Wondering if anyone has heard of Twonky Beam from Twonky Media? You can download a free plug-in for your Microsoft IE 6.0 and above browser. It allows you to stream audio and video media from your browser directly to connected devices in your home (e.g. dlna & upnp complaint devices). Check it out! http://www.twonkymedia.com/beam
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Guest (Marco de Salvo)
New Browsing Interface
I think that modern computers are able to support new graphical interfaces, more focused on "intuitive navigation". The simple click action, is probably unecessary. I imagine a future Browser in which the links and the pages simply opens when I move the mouse on the specific item.
Another scenario maybe the 3D navigation interface, where a rotation of the geometry can show many "facets" of the same webpage in an interactive way.
But all these innovations must put the user at the core in terms of usability and intuitive navigation.
Mrco
http://www.marcodesalvo.it
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