Terry Jones

I find it interesting to look for things we take for granted, and to ask what the world would look like if the basic assumptions were outlandishly violated.

Recently I’ve been thinking about browsing. What do we all take for granted when browsing? A biggie is that when we click on a link (or open a new tab) the browser should take us to what we asked for, and do it immediately.

Below are some fanciful ways in which that could be different. You can probably think of others. Imagine if:

• When you click a link, the new page is shown as usual, but only at some random point in the future. Clicking a link or opening a new tab on a URL, causes your current tab to immediately close!
• Your browser restricts you to having (say) at most 10 tabs open. If you try to open more, the browser automatically picks another open tab and closes it. When you drop back under 10 tabs, a tab that was automatically closed pops into existence again.
• When you click to follow a link or you open a new tab, the page appears in someone else’s browser, not in yours.
• You and a group of friends are limited in the number of total tabs you can collectively have open. If you open a tab that takes you over the limit, a random tab is closed in the browser of a random group member. When the group drops under the limit, the tab is re-opened in the browser of a random group member.
• You and a group of friends are limited so that only one of you can be looking at any given URL. I.e., if you go to a URL that one of your group already has open, their browser automatically closes their tab.
• When you click on a link, your browser shows you the page and the page also appears in the browsers of a group of friends. If a friend then clicks on a link on that page, your tab follows along.
• When reading an interesting page, with one click you can send the URL to a group of friends, whose browsers all load the page.

The nice thing about this kind of blue-sky thinking is that it starts out as frivolous or even ridiculous, but can quickly lead to interesting new approaches. For example, the idea of opening tabs in the future comes directly from questioning the immediacy of link following. Hot on the heels of the ridiculous idea of never following links at all, we land right next to the idea of a Read-Later button that millions of people already find very useful.

Anyway….. I decided to have some fun and implement several of the above for the Chrome and Chromium. I’ll write them up separately very soon.

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