So tell me, how many times do you look at the URL for the pages you are visiting while you are browsing? Once, twice… every time you visit a new link??
I’ve come to notice that when people visit a website, all he needed the address bar is just once, the first time he types in (or ctrl+v in) the main URL to which page he is visiting. After that, he keep following the links in the page and hardly ever needed to see which URL he’s visiting. Or, to do more justice, think of yourself, are you interested in looking at all the random URLs generated or those real long URLs of every page you visit? Do you ever keep track of them?? Of course, for security purpose, you may perhaps want to make it sure that you are still in the particular domain you intend to visit!!
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Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer: Notice how many screen real estate does the address bar occupy.
So, the conclusion is, we don’t need the address bar to occupy so much screen real estate.
Now, I’ve observed my friends and myself clicking on each tab turn by turn (when more than one tab is opened) waiting for the pages in the tabs to load. When you are on a tab, you don’t know how much the the other pages in the other opened tabs are loaded with as the loading indication doesn’t tell you how much it has loaded. So, I’ve decided to use a visual indication that will show the users about the loading status of the other opened tabs other than the currently active one. Considering the above two issues, here is how my design looks.
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Of course, it’s a flavor of Chrome. One can prob’ly tweak into Chromium open source codes and develop this UI.
When a user first opens the browser, the main functioning area of the concept browser will be as in the image above. I guess, if I’ve done a great job with this concept browser UI, then I think I don’t need to explain everything here. Let the image speak for itself. I’ll just make a few inputs here and there though.
After the user typed in the URL, the page starts loading and the address bar area (as can be seen in the image above) will slide up hiding it from view. The red bar on top of the currently active tab (or a Pan here) is the close button. It is much more convenient to close an opened pan in this form because of it’s position (since it lies at the top limit of the screen where the cursor can move) and size than a typical ‘X’ close button used in Chrome or Firefox. Then there goes the open new Pan button; the Open New Pan button is flexible and expandable. It will expand and try to accommodate all the horizontal space as the Pans are closed or contract as new Pans are opened.
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As can be seen in this image above, the vertical height is almost similar to the regular Chrome browser which is known for it’s cleanliness. The real time thumbnails of the pages being loaded sometimes let users think that it occupies too much vertical screen real estate which is not true. The users, after a few moments of trying the concept UI should find it real easy to acquaint with. The address bar, if at any point of time, the user wants to see it, then he can just click on the address bar slider or just press a small keyboard shortcut (prob’ly F6 key) and see the browser control as above.
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Above two images shows how error messaging can be handled. The orange address bar slider indicates an unmatched server certificate while the red one indicates a phishing link.
Any inputs, suggestions or questions, let me answer you in the comments!!
