How I would design a touchscreen browser

This is again, an old idea of mine, I drew it on a sheet of paper maybe a year ago, but I just remembered it.

A common theme with modern browser is maximizing screen estate (which I don’t actually care about, becasue I have 2 huge monitors). But if I were to have a netbook or some otherwise technically restrained device, I would think that screen estate is important.

My Idea is pretty cool. The idea is that there is only a tab bar on top. It’s as usual, allocated to the tabs, and there is on the side, a new tab button. But for this, the new tab button occupies the entire rest of the space of the tab bar, because space is precious. Sort of like the Mozilla Fennec browser.

forward and backwards navigation is achieved by throwing (not just gentle pushing, throwing, it should be kinetic, if you don’t thow hard enough, it just shows some text saying the equivalent of “throw harder!”).

At least in the way I browse, I don’t enter URLs often unless I’m on about:blank. So there is no URL bar. To find what URL you’re on, or to enter a new one, simply double tap on the current tab. It expands and fills the tab bar with a text box and the other tabs are condensed to icons.

Swiping down shows a drop-down for a tab with options to do things like bookmark or view source.

Thowing a tab down (which is a more violent swipe) removes the tab. Something partly inspired by the Mac OS X dock.

The new tab button could also be a menu, swiping down to reveal a menu of bookmarks to select from.

And the new tab page could be almost like a desktop. with widgets, gadgets and whatever (Google wave? If only I got my dev invite :’(). Well, in my idea, the top portion of the new tab page could be the URL bar and the rest could be whatever other browsers are doing + maybe some widgets/gadgets Dashboard or Plasma style.