This concept was done a while ago, but I was too lazy to blog about it. It’s a little too late since voting has already ended… but anyway, since you are reading this page, you wouldn’t mind seeing something new, right?

I had been designing user interfaces for various software for a long time. Most of my work is realized in Trillian Astra, of course. Though I had already reserved all my ideas related to chat and social messaging to Trillian, there are still plenty of stray ideas left on the cutting table. I figured it will be nice to contribute some to the future of the web, like this particular contest from Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The challenge of the Summer contest is to design a replacement for tabs in a web browser.

The concept here I had designed is called “Browspace”. The general idea is to create usable tabs by employing web page rendering technologies we had discovered in developing mobile browsers into the desktop.

By converging desktop and mobile browser technologies, we will able to generate a fluid environment where as much content as pleased can be fitted to the limited, yet ever-increasing, desktop real estate.

There are more and more people with monitors of high screen resolutions, and as we know, web pages are facing a design problem of whether or not to support screens of such sizes while neglecting people with small screens.

I’m pretty sure we had seen people with a monitor with 1600×1200 resolution, to have a browser window maximized, but the web pages are dangling in the middle with huge areas left on the sides. Likewise, we had also seen people with still 800×600 monitors (and increasing so with the advent of MIDs), hopelessly trying to scroll left and right, back and forth!

There must be a better solution to optimize web pages to screen sizes, and I think mobile browsers did a great job… despite to the horror of web designers, those browsers sliced and diced the pages to readable bits that distort the proportions of the site completely…

…which reminds me at the end of the day, content is king. It is much more important to be able to read every bit of information, than to be able to see the web site rendered pixel perfect. Therefore, when pages and tab thumbnails are displayed with such limited space, I will propose that meaningful content – where the page will be scaled down only to the point the text is legible enough – should be displayed, instead of simply having an arbitrary thumbnail of the whole site.

The result, as simplistic as it may seem, is a proposal for a better way to render site thumbnails for tabs.

For example, a tab with an RSS feed will be rendered as a list of news items, and a tab for a normal page will be rendered as an excerpt of the paragraph you were reading.

For further reading, the full proposal is now posted at: http://www.arkidect.com/project/browspace/

It is also accompanied with a short video demo: http://vimeo.com/5273372

If you are interested in the concept, or if you are a developer interested in taking the concept to reality, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thanks!