Freie Freude

Some time ago, I wrote a small functional prototype to explore some of the design ideas for the evolution of the GNOME Web browser (maintained by my colleagues at Igalia). I thought that it would be a good idea to show these experiments to a wider public.

The basic idea by the GNOME designers is that, instead of tabs, open pages would be placed in an overview: you would click on a thumbnail there to return to a certain web page, and clicking again on “Pages” would take you back to the overview. A possible evolution of this would be to integrate bookmarks and reading lists in that overview.

This first video shows the interaction as described in the current design: in the overview, open pages are shown in a horizontal list, which gets reordered so that the leftmost element in the list corresponds to the last open tab. Note how the thumbnail is updated whenever we go back to “Pages”, and how the list scrolls to the left to show the most recently opened sites.

(link to video)

I also implemented an alternative UI where the open pages are arranged in a static 2D grid. Here it is:

(link to video)

This little application was written in a bit over 200 lines of QML. The code is available here:

• http://people.igalia.com/femorandeira/files/Ephy_20120530.tar.gz

The project folder includes compiled binaries that should work on, at least, 64-bit Debian and Ubuntu. Just uncompress it and run

cd Ephy ; ./Ephy

Note that if you want to build it yourself, you will need the qt4, qt-webkit and qmlviewer development libraries for your distribution; then, you can just run

make distclean ; qmake && make