Visual Web Browsing Starts to Take Hold

By Mike Gunderloy Jan. 31, 2008, 11:00am PDT 5 Comments

There are reasons why user interfaces like Apple’s “Cover Flow” are popular. Most people are pretty good at pattern recognition, so having little pictures of things to recognize makes sense; it’s easier to find what you’re looking for by flipping through pictures than by scanning a list of text entries. Plus, let’s face it, many of us are magpies at heart: we enjoy shiny things. Cover Flow-style interfaces provide an easy and fun way to sort through large volumes of information and find the piece you want at any given time.

It’s not surprising that people have been trying to apply similar visual metaphors to web browsing for quite some time. Dedicated “3D browsers” like Browse3D and SpaceTime have been around for years, offering ways to capture multiple web pages and flip between them. But these have remained very much niche applications, in part because they can’t hope to match any of the mainstream browsers in features. Lately, however, I’ve seen three examples of this sort of visual browsing interface implemented within other browsers, which offer a more likely way for most users to experiment. ScreenshotWeb2Wave is the most ambitious of these projects (and also the one with the roughest edges currently). Supporting Firefox, IE, and Safari, it presents its own tabbed interface within one of the host browser tabs, using “surflets” to create a sort of visual analog of the traditional portal page. You can add and rearrange surflets, or flip through all of your existing surflets in a flowing interface. Personally, I find Web2Wave’s combination of visual metaphors to be a bit confusing at the moment, and hope they can clean up and polish their user interface, but I can see how it would be useful if you have a few dozen sites that you flip through on a regular basis.

ScreenshotPicLens is specialized but visually gorgeous. Available for IE, Firefox, and Safari, it’s an add-in that manages to break the bounds of the browser. When you go visit a supported image site (such as Google Images, Photobucket, or Flickr), a click will get you into the PicLens full-screen slideshow view. Depending on your browser, you can also see a “3D Wall” of photos that you can drag around and zoom in on. It’s quite an impressive interface to play with, and actually makes it easier and funner to find one photo in a sea of similar images. There’s also an API to let you add PicLens support to your own site.

ScreenshotRedZee applies a visual flow metaphor to search. Put in your search term, wait while RedZee loads thumbnails, and then you get an arc of results presented as site images. You can drag the arc back and forth with your mouse for a smooth browsing experience. Snippets of the foreground site are presented to give you a bit of context. I’d class this one as an interesting experiment – it’s nice to see the snapshots, but the delay in loading means it’s not going to take my search business away from Google.

With increasing bandwidth to our desktops, and increasing processor power once it gets there, it seems inevitable that we’ll continue to see more of these experiments. For the immediate future, the most useful ones will be targeted niche efforts like PicLens. Within two to three years, though, I expect to see one of the mainstream browser vendors offer a similar user interface as a standard option.