reinventing safari
how apple could reinvent the web browser
How old and outdated is the web browser — any web browser, whether it be Safari or Chrome? The web browser is one of the first apps we’ve used on a computer, yet we rarely think of it as an app. As the internet evolved over the past twenty years, they have remained largely the same.
We spend so much time browsing the web that we hardly even think about the browser as an app.
Two Berlin design students, Julius Sohn and Julius Gehrig, have created what a browser would look like if it were built for the modern day. Let’s take a look at the concept browser named Refresh…
refresh is packed with modernized features:
Tab management: the ability to sort open tabs into categories
Collecting information: categorizing saved information for later, and surfacing it when it becomes relevant
Context sensitivity: more proactive in suggesting actions dependent on things like the time of day, past browsing experience, and based on what types of websites you’re visiting
Browsing history: a visual browsing history that can be searched by tags or by type of content
Tags: the ability to tag websites so they can be easily recalled: such as searching tags “Saved” and “Yesterday” will pull all websites that were saved the prior day.
The ability to focus: when you want to focus on the content of a website without distractions, flip a switch. A Soundcloud page turns into a clean music player. All of the headings are removed from a news article.
Gestures: Let’s swipe left to view our history and right to open a new tab. Then swipe up or down with two fingers to switch between spaces (categories).
searching
a snapshot of the search bar’s capabilities…
focus view
Below are snapshots of web pages with the Focus feature enabled.
You can imagine what they look like without the Focus.
the website
Of course, you can see all of these features in detail by visiting the conceptual brower’s website refresh.study.